Prosecutors in Germany have filed charges against a 90-year-old man for allegedly helping to murder 430,000 Jews during World War II. Samuel Kunz, 90, was charged in a Bonn court last week. He has reportedly admitted to working in the Nazi extermination camp Belzec in occupied Poland.
Kunz, who denies having personally murdered anyone, also is charged in connection with two incidents at Belzec in which ten Jews were killed. He was a witness in the Munich war crimes trial against John Demjanjuk, who is charged as an accomplice in the murders of 27,900 Jews while serving as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland.
"The prosecution decided to file the charges with the chamber because at the beginning of the period the accused was an adolescent," court spokesman Matthias Nordmeyer told the BBC. Under German law, adult suspects aged between 18 and 21 can be charged as minors or as adults.
Two other men under investigation for possible Nazi-era war crimes died earlier this month before going on trial. Former SS officer Erich Steidtmann, 95, accused of leading Nazi police battalions that committed mass murder of Jews in eastern Europe, died this week in Hanover. Adolf Storms, 90, indicted for killing 57 Jewish men in Austria in March 1945 at the end of World War II, died in his home city of Duisburg. He allegedly forced the men, slave laborers, to hand over their valuables before he shot them.
