German prosecutors have decided not to prosecute former concentration camp guard Friedrich Karl B. because there is insufficient evidence to bring him to court. The 95-year-old man was extradited from the United States to Germany last month.
In 1945, B. worked for a few months as a guard in a branch of concentration camp Neuengamme (south of Hamburg), where Dutch prisoners were also held and died under appalling conditions. The man, who still has German nationality, arrived in the city of Frankfurt at the end of February.
The German had lived in the US since 1959. He was there last year The Washington Post about his planned deportation. B. said that he only worked in the camp for a short time and that he had not carried a weapon. “It’s ridiculous to do this after 75 years,” he said.
In recent years, elderly former camp guards have repeatedly had to appear before a German court. The authorities see a better chance of bringing them to trial since the conviction of John Demjanjuk in 2011, who was sentenced to prison for complicity in the murder of at least 28,000 people when it was only proven that he had been a camp guard in Sobibór. Until this ruling, it was assumed that individual blame had to be established for the Nazi crimes.
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