German man accused of murdering 58 Jewish slave laborers in Austria

19 November 2009

A 90-year-old former SS member has been charged by German prosecutors with the killing of 58 Jewish forced laborers in the final days of World War II. Adolf Storms is accused of murdering the workers in Deutsch-Schützen, a village in eastern Austria, at the end of World War II. The victims' remains were found in a mass grave in 1995. They were forced to kneel by a mass grave and then shot. Storms is also accused of shooting dead another laborer who collapsed during the march.

The German state court was told that on 29 March 1945, the accused and some accomplices brought at least 58 Jewish slave laborers to a forest "where they had to give up their valuables and kneel by a grave". "The accused and other SS members then cruelly shot the Jewish forced laborers from behind," a spokesman for the prosecution said.

Prosecutors began investigating the case last year when they were alerted by a 28-year-old Austrian university student who had been researching the massacre. Prosecutor Andreas Brendel told the news agency AP that three former members of the Hitler Youth had provided testimony in Austria. A fourth former Hitler Youth member, now living in Canada, is being interviewed this week, Brendel said.

A court in Duisburg, where Storms lives, now has to decide whether the trial of the man is to go ahead. The defendant has two weeks to present evidence him, or to appeal against the case proceeding.

The indictment of Storms comes two weeks before the start of the trial of former US citizen Ivan Demjanjuk, 89, a suspected Nazi death-camp guard accused of helping to murder 27,900 Jews in the Nazi death camp Sobibor.

 

Australia decides to extradite suspected Nazi war criminal to Hungary

WJC and the Legacy of the Holocaust