The trial of a former SS medic on 3,681 counts of accessory to murder for allegedly helping the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp function appeared close to collapse Monday, after a doctor found the 95-year-old unfit to be transported to the court.
Presiding Judge Klaus Kabisch told the Neubrandenburg state court Monday that proceedings couldn’t begin after a doctor on the weekend found Hubert Zafke was suffering from stress and high blood pressure, and had suicidal thoughts.
Kabisch said Zafke had told the doctor “I can’t take it anymore, I’m at my end,” and that “I want to be with mother.” The judge said the latter was a reference to Zafke’s wife, who died in 2011.
The trial’s opening was postponed until the next session on March 14.
(The Archive of the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau via AP)
Prosecutors allege that Zafke’s unit was involved in putting gas into gas chambers to kill Jews and others, screening blood and other samples from hospitalized women prisoners, and otherwise helping the camp run by treating SS guard personnel.
They say the unit was also involved in auxiliary guard duties.
Zafke’s attorney insists his client was just a medic who did nothing criminal at Auschwitz.
The trial is one of several in recent years to arise from a shift in German legal thinking. Prosecutors have successfully argued that since Nazi death camps’ entire purpose was to murder Jews and others, helping the camp run in any manner makes one an accessory to those murders.
The charges against Zafke stem from a one-month period in 1944 and involve the deaths of Jews who arrived in 14 transports, including one that brought Anne Frank and her family to the camp. Frank died later at Bergen-Belsen.
Zafke was initially found unfit for trial by the court in Neubrandenburg, north of Berlin, but an appeals court overruled that after more medical exams, saying the retired farmer could stand trial so long as sessions were limited to two hours at a time.
Ahead of the trial, prosecutors and attorneys representing Jewish Auschwitz survivors who have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law, accused the Neubrandenburg judges of bias, but a motion to have them replaced was rejected.
Cornelius Nestler, who represents two brothers from Colorado who survived Auschwitz as young boys but lost both their parents, said his feelings were reinforced by the court’s decision to postpone the trial based on the assessment of a doctor called by Zafke’s children on Saturday, while there were two doctors in the court prepared to assess him.
“This court over the last months have shown that it is not interested in this going to trial at all,” he said.
Both defense and prosecution agreed that before the next session, Zafke will be assessed the same morning by court-appointed experts.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
This evil man should stand trial for the heinous actions he is accused of participating in. He should also be monitored around the clock to make sure he is unable to commit suicide. If found guilty his death should come at the hands of an executioner rather than on his own schedule.
The chance of finding other Nazi war criminals get smaller with each passing day due to their advanced age. The ones who slip through the earthly hands of justice will have their day in front of God. Hopefully they will spend their eternity with Hitler burning in Hell.
I would rather have nazi war criminals repent and be with God than to burn. That is what Jesus would want. After all we are all sinners and one small sin is as bad as a large one in the eyes of God.
Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel ! Just how far should we go for our vengeance? What about the cleaning crews. How about the engineer of the trains or the people that built the trains. Then there are the people who ran the power plants and kept the camps going. How about the ones that built the camps? On an on. vengeances just wonderful and never stops!!!
Those individuals are probably all deceased and faced a trial with their maker.
Maybe you should take a tour of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Sobibor, etc. We always hear about the 6 million Jews, and Jews were the largest group to be targeted. However, the total number who died in these death factories was more than 12 million and included Gypsies, homosexuals, physically disabled, mentally disabled, dissidents (both native Germans as well as those from occupied nations), Resistance fighters, etc. Josef Mengele (aka The Angel of Death) performed many “medical’ experiments on inmates at Auschwitz, the most famous of which were the experiments on twins. The camps were operated by the SS.
One did not just join the SS, and one was not assigned to the SS. It was an elite organization. In order to join, one had to prove one’s racial purity back to at least 1800, be at least 5 ft 8.5 inches tall, healthy, normal vision w/o correct, excellent teeth or complete dental work prior to joining, have a “national socialist” viewpoint, single (not even engaged). Therefore, joining was a conscious choice and decision. What you call vengeance, most people call justice.
they have them working and make the atomic bomb
He has had probably 70 years of self punishment and shame for what he did. Why waste the money.
He has no shame or remorse. No one who could do the things he did would.
But it is too late to try him. Let him play the age card and hold him until he kills himself or dies.
A man is not guilty simply because he is charged, but if he is guilty of some minor crime such as giving an SS guard an aspirin– give him a break. God said Vengeance is mine I will repay saith the Lord. When will this lust for revenge end? I’m sure Southerners would have wanted revenge against Sherman’s war crimes but did not seek it.
I have been to Dachau…my company commander took my unit on 2 tours (that will always stay with me to the day I die….the concentration/death camp at Dachau and the Eastern border of (W. Germany 1975), to impress upon us as to why we were stationed on the border and to not forget history. Any surviving bastard that served in the SS at concentration camps or committed other atrocities should be tried…and if convicted, publicly hanged. There are several documented cases whereas female resistance fighters were burned alive in the ovens. Show mercy on these evil people…no way in hell.
He was probably following orders and he probably would have been shot as a traitor if he hadn’t of done what they wanted him to do. I agree what the Germans was doing was wrong. I would say that not all Germans were bad people. Some of them were just trying to live. They were all brain washed that Hitler was going to rule the world. Some of them probably thought what they were doing was good for their country even tho it wasn’t. The man is 95 years old, he is not going to live much longer anyway. God will be his judge.
Remember, we forgave the Japanese and helped them rebuild their country to avoid the vengeful mistakes that were perpetrated by the Allies against Germany after WWI that set the stage for the rise of the Third Reich that led to WWII. It’s all in the history books. There has to be an end to it, and restoration and reconciliation, or everybody loses, especially subsequent generations who had no part in the war. If you want to see what a never ending centuries-old cycle of vengeance produces, look at the Middle East.