Second former death camp guard may face German war crime charges

Nov 1, 2009, 13:50 GMT

   Munich - As Germany prepares to try John Demjanjuk, 89, for his alleged work in a Nazi death camp, prosecutors are mulling charging a second man who was employed by the Nazi SS, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

It reported that the 88-year-old man, who lives near Bonn, had described his experiences as a camp guard to German police in 1969, 1975 and 1980 and again in June this year in connection with the Demjanjuk case, but had never been charged.

Spiegel said the man was likely to appear as a witness in the Demjanjuk case, which is scheduled to begin in Munich on November 30.

Both men were reportedly captured Red Army soldiers who volunteered for an SS training base at Travniki and then became auxiliaries to the SS at so-called extermination camps in eastern Europe.

In a report to appear on Monday, the magazine said the Bonn man described how he guarded Jewish prisoners at Belzec, another SS camp.

'We all knew that Jews were being exterminated there and then cremated,' he reportedly told police, describing Belzec.

Spiegel said Germany's national office on war crimes had opened a preliminary investigation into the Bonn man with a view to charging him with being an accessory to the murder of at least 434,000 people.'

Demjanjuk faces similar charges in connection with the murder of 27,900 at Sobibor death camp during the months he is known to have been employed there in 1943. In all, the Sobibor site killed about 250,000 European Jews. It employed about 100 Travniki auxiliaries.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who was deported from the United States to Germany in May, was acquitted in the 1990s of having worked at yet another camp, Treblinka, with Israeli supreme court judges saying he may have been confused with another guard nicknamed Ivan the Terrible.