A 93-year old man suspected of being a former guard at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz will be tried in the new year, a German court said on Monday, according to the 'Reuters' news agency.
Oskar Gröning will go on trial in Lüneburg, near Hamburg, next April on charges of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people. Prosecutors said the man is believed to have worked as an SS guard at the camp in occupied Poland between September 1942 and October 1944, where he was in charge of counting and managing the money seized from those deported to Auschwitz.
The charges relate to a two-month period between May and July 1944, when an estimated 137 trains arrived at the camp carrying 425,000 people, mostly from Hungary. At least 300,000 of them were murdered immediately. Oskar Gröning has spoken openly in interviews about his time as an SS guard at the infamous death camp, but insisted he only witnessed atrocities and did not any crimes.
"The accused knew that, as part of the selection process, those not chosen for work and told they were going to the showers were really going to the gas chambers where they would be put to death in an agonizing manner," the court said in a previous statement issued in September.
Some 16 survivors or relatives of survivors have come forward, the court said. Eight have been accepted as witnesses.
