'Former Auschwitz Guard', 93, Charged with Being Accessory to Murder as German Prosecutors Continue Attempts to Bring Low-Level Nazis to Justice Before They Die
- Hans Lipschis is accused of working at the death camp from 1941 to 1943
- Fourth on the most wanted list of Nazi-hunters
- Lipschis, who lived in the US for 26 years, claims he was a cook
- Prosecution part of 'last chance' hunt for ageing former SS men
A 93-year-old alleged to have been a guard at the infamous Auschwitz death camp has been charged by German prosecutors as an accessory to murder.
The action against the man, named as Hans Lipschis by the German media, is part of a renewed drive to bring lower-level Nazi collaborators to justice before they die.
The prosecution service in the city of Stuttgart said the accused worked as a guard at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1941 to 1943, a period in which 12 prisoner convoys arrived at the death camp.
The 'Arbeit Mact Frei' sign hangs above Auschwitz concentration camp, where prosecutors allege Lipschis
worked as a guard from 1941 to 1943, a period in which 12 prisoner convoys arrived at the death camp
Hans Lipschis was born in Lithuania in 1919 and was granted 'ethnic German'
status in 1943. This is his ID Card from Auschwitz
More than 10,000 of those prisoners were determined unfit for work and sent to the gas chamber immediately upon arrival.
Lipschis, who was not named by prosecutors, was arrested by German police in May, and ranks fourth on the Nazi-hunting group Simon Wiesenthal's list of most wanted Nazi criminals.
Lipschis's arrest was made possible by the 2011 conviction in Munich of Ivan Demjanjuk, who was found to have been an accessory to the murder of almost 28,000 Jews in Sobibor by virtue of having served as a guard at a death camp.
He was the first ex-Nazi convicted in Germany without evidence of a specific crime or a specific victim.
Lipschis told the German newspaper Die Welt this year that he had been a cook at Auschwitz and had later left the camp to fight on the Eastern Front, although he could not remember which unit he had been in.
The main guard house at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland, where Lipschis claimed he worked as a cook
A haunting image of children wearing concentration camp uniforms, taken during the liberation
of Auschwitz, where some 1.5 million people perished between 1940 and 1945
The head of the German agency that probes Nazi war crimes, Kurt Schrimm, said the accused was on a list of 30 former Auschwitz guards it wants to prosecute for their role in facilitating mass murder.
'The investigation was short but intensive. We looked for documents that showed that (the accused) was on duty on particular days when the transports came in,' said Claudia Krauth, state prosecutor for the Stuttgart court.
'If we have proof that someone has committed a crime, we are required to prosecute that person.'
The Stuttgart prosecutors said the accused had lived in the United States for 26 years after WW2, but had had his US citizenship revoked after his involvement with the Nazis came to light.
He moved back to Germany in 1982.
Lipschis's arrest was made possible by the 2011 conviction in Munich of Ivan Demjanjuk, pictured, which set a new precedent
whereby it was enough for people to have served at a site of mass extermination without specific acts being proved
German officials are trying to track down other low-level collaborators in a 'last chance' hunt for ageing perpetrators of the Holocaust, in which some 6 million Jews were murdered.
Some 1.5 million people perished at Auschwitz, mostly Jews but also Roma, Poles and others, between 1940 and 1945.