12/09/2016 jpupdates.com
Auschwitz Paramedic Stands Trial As Accessory to the Murder of Over 3,000 People
by Menachem Rephun

Hubert Zafke, a former paramedic at Auschwitz, was charged in a German court Monday with being an accessory to the murder of as many as 3,681 people at the Nazi death camp. The 95-year-old Zafke’s trial was postponed three times due to health reasons, including stress, high blood pressure, and suicidal thoughts. The indictment against Zafke covers the time he served as an Auschwitz medic from August 15-September 14 1944.

Approximately 1.1. million people, mainly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, one of the most notorious of Hitler’s death camps. Zafke’s prosecution claims he was aware of Auschwitz’s function as “an industrial-scale mass murder site,” and witnessed Jews being sent to their deaths, though he was not directly involved in the killings. Zafke nevertheless stands accused of facilitating mass murder by helping the camp operate.

Prosecutors say Zafke’s unit facilitated the mass murders at Auschwitz by placing gas into the gas chambers used to suffocate Jews, screening blood samples from hospitalized female prisoners, and treating S.S. guards, according to Daily Mail.co.uk.

14 trains carrying Jews from Slovenia, Greece, Germany, and the Netherlands arrived at Auschwitz during Zafke’s time working at the camp. One of those prisoners was the famed teenage German-Jewish diarist Anne Frank. Frank perished in April 1945, shortly before the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen death camp where she and her older sister Margot had been transported. Anne Frank’s father, Otto, was the only member of the family to survive.

As the generation of both perpetrators and survivors passes away, Zafke’s trial may represent one of the last attempts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. Many leading Nazis escaped punishment by seeking asylum in South America, or by taking their own lives before standing trial. Adolf Hitler, the linchpin of the Nazi genocide, was never brought to justice, instead taking his own life with mistress Eva Braun in Hitler’s bunker in the last days of the war, as the Soviet army advanced on Berlin.

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