A 95-year-old man who worked as a paramedic at Auschwitz will stand trial next month as an accessory to the murder of 3,681 death camp inmates, a German court announced Monday.
Hubert Zafke, accused by prosecutors of serving as an SS sergeant in Hitler’s killing machine, is set to face justice Feb. 29 in Neubrandenburg state court.
Zafke was stationed at Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944 and would have been on duty at the notorious death camp when diarist Anne Frank and her family were sent there on Sept. 5, 1944, authorities have said.
Frank, whose writings on hiding from Nazis pursuers became the most famous book about the Holocaust, was later transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was killed.
While Zafke allegedly worked as a medic, prosecutors said, his real role had little to do with caring for sick or wounded inmates.
Instead, his unit was responsible for maintaining and administering the poison gas that murdered prisoners, prosecutors said.
Defense lawyers have argued he had no direct role in the genocide.
Zafke himself doesn’t deny serving at Auschwitz but has said: “I heard nothing, saw nothing, killed no one.”
But prosecutors said Zafke could still be criminally liable if it’s shown he knew about the mass murders and willingly joined the organizational structure to carry them out.
Last year, 94-year-old Oskar Gröning — known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” — was sentenced to four years for his role in the prison camp.
After the war, Zafke got married and had four kids, raising them in Gnevkow in northeastern Germany — in what was formerly East Germany.
He worked in the manufacture and sale of agricultural products, including pesticides.
When the Soviet Union and the East Bloc fell, records of potential war criminals like Zafke — who joined the Hitler Youth at age 13 — suddenly became available and he found himself in the cross hairs of Nazi-hunters.