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 court in Hanau (center) will have to rule again on 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 murder of prisoners in more than 3,300 cases, 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”.
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.
In 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.
