NEUBRANDENBURG (GERMANY) – Former SS medic Hubert Zafke, 95, faces trial Monday for aiding in 3,681 murders in Auschwitz during the period when teenage diarist Anne Frank was interned in the Nazi death camp.The trial is part of Germany’s twilight bid to bring to justice the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust, focused on about a dozen people who were cogs in the killing machine.
The case against Zafke centres on his service as an SS medical orderly from August 15 to September 14, 1944 in the vast Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where an estimated 1.1 million people perished.Prosecutors charge that, by serving there, Zafke “knew of and willingly supported the industrially organised mass killing of people in an insidious and cruel manner”.
During the month-long period, 14 trains arrived at Auschwitz, delivering prisoners from across Europe to its slave labour camps and gas chambers.
One of the trains brought the family of Anne Frank, whose diary about her Jewish family’s life in hiding in Amsterdam has moved millions and remains a worldwide bestseller.Anne Frank survived Auschwitz but died in Bergen-Belsen, shortly before its 1945 liberation by the British Army.
Zafke, a farmer’s son who joined the Nazi party’s elite police force the Waffen-SS at age 19 and initially fought on the eastern front, had also served as an officer at Auschwitz from October 1943 to January 1944.After World War II, a Polish court in 1948 sentenced him to a four-year jail term from which he was released in 1951.
During his time as a medical orderly — a job that entailed giving lethal injections to inmates — Zafke has claimed to have only performed first aid and treated prisoners.He has told investigators he had no clue Auschwitz was an extermination camp and thought the crematoriums were heating plants.
Holocaust survivors and their children from various countries are expected to attend Zafke’s trial in Neubrandenburg, 130 kilometres (80 miles) north of Berlin.Zafke has since 1951 lived near the town, in what became communist East Germany after World War II.
He raised four sons and worked as a pest controller at a local mill until his retirement.
Zafke will be defended by Peter-Michael Diestel, who served as East Germany’s last interior minister and opened a private law practice in the years after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
If found guilty, Zafke faces three to 15 years in prison, in what may be a largely symbolic sentence given his advanced age.
Source: AFP, 29 Feb 2016
