Mannheim Regional Court has rejected the opening of a main trial against a 94-year-old alleged supervisor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The competent chamber, according to a comprehensive medical report, the man's ability to negotiate as not given, said the court. The 94-year-old should answer for murder.
The public prosecutor accuses him, at the latest after completion of his basic training from December 1942 to the end of January 1943 by his watch and standby service "to have supported the camp operation and thus the extermination actions". The accused informed his defense attorney that he was "not aware of the background, the direction and the course of the killings".
In the period for which the 94-year-old should answer in court, arrived at the prosecutor's office at least 15 rail transports in Auschwitz. More than 13,000 people were classified as unable to work and were murdered in the gas chambers. Prosecutors and co-plaintiff can appeal against the decision.
Similar cases were only occasionally negotiated before German courts in recent years. The case of the now-defunct Auschwitz accountant Oskar Gröning, who was sentenced by the Lüneburg Regional Court in 2015 to a four-year prison sentence for aiding and abetting murder in at least 300,000 cases, was groundbreaking.
The judgment was also confirmed by the Federal Supreme Court. Gröning died in March at the age of 96 years shortly before a possible imminent incarceration.