Will justice catch up with a Nazi torturer 80 years later? A German court has relaunched proceedings against a 100-year-old former SS guard from the Sachsenhausen Nazi camp, whose appearance had been refused due to his state of health. The Hanau court will once again have to decide whether or not to open a trial, the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court announced on Tuesday.
The accused is a former SS guard from the Sachsenhausen Nazi camp, north of Berlin, charged since the summer of 2023 with complicity in the murders of more than 3,300 prisoners, between 1943 and 1945, during the Second World War.
According to German media, the man's name is Gregor Formanek. The prosecution, which called for a trial, accuses this man, a young adult at the time of the events, of “having supported, as a member of the SS guard teams, the cruel and perfidious killing of thousands of detainees”.
Formanek lived for decades in a modest apartment near Frankfurt, undetected, until journalists tracked him down in 2023. Incriminating documents revealed by British press from German federal archives and Stasi archives reveal Formanek's exterminating past.
Born in Romania to a German-speaking tailor, Formanek joined the SS on July 4, 1943 and was part of the guard battalion in Sachsenhausen, Brandenburg. A Stasi document chillingly states that Formanek “continued to kill prisoners.” In his post-World War II CV, Formanek did not mention his role as a concentration camp guard, only indicating that he had been “called up for military service in Germany, where I spent 20 months,” says the Daily Mail.
Deemed unfit last June
A first psychiatric analysis from 2022, which considered the suspect “at least partially fit to stand trial”, was contradicted by a second, in 2024, judging him unfit. Last May, the Hanau court therefore refused to open a trial on the basis of the most recent expertise. But “the information in the report is not sufficient”, considers the appeal court.
Between 1936 and 1945, the Sachsenhausen camp saw some 200,000 prisoners, mainly political opponents, Jews and homosexuals. Tens of thousands of them died, victims mainly of exhaustion due to forced labor and cruel prison conditions.
Several trials of former Nazi camp employees have taken place in recent years in Germany, since the conviction in 2011 of the former guard of the Sobibor extermination camp, John Demjanjuk, which set a precedent. Given the great age of the accused, the trials sometimes could not be held for health reasons or, when they did take place, the condemned died before being imprisoned, like John Demjanjuk.
Josef Schütz, a former concentration camp guard sentenced in June 2022 to five years in prison, died less than a year later at the age of 102 while his defense appealed…
