BERLIN
— A former Nazi death camp guard has been charged with participating
in the murder of 430,000 Jews and other crimes during the
Third Reich, German prosecutors said Wednesday.
Samuel Kunz, 90, was informed last week of his indictment on charges including
participation in the murder of 430,000 Jews at the Belzec
death camp in occupied Poland, where he served as a guard
from January 1942 to July 1943, prosecutor Christoph Goeke
in Dortmund said.
Kunz is also charged with murder over "personal
excesses" in which he allegedly shot a total of 10 Jews in two other incidents, Goeke
told The Associated Press.
Kunz, who is No. 3 on the Simon Wiesenthal
Center's list of most-wanted Nazi suspects, lives near the
western German city of Bonn. When reached by phone, he said
he did not want to talk about the allegations and hung up.
Goeke said the case has been sent
to the state court in Bonn, where officials were checking
whether and when to hold a trial — a standard procedural
step in Germany.
Bonn court spokesman Matthias Nordmeyer
said the court did not want to comment now on the case.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter
at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Kunz participated in
the so-called Operation Reinhard to eliminate Polish Jewry.
"The indictment of Samuel
Kunz is a very positive development," Zuroff told AP from Jerusalem. "It reflects recent changes in the German prosecution policy, which have significantly
enlarged the number of suspects who will be brought to justice."
Zuroff said Kunz had never previously
been on trial because of his allegedly Nazi past and that
his name first came up in investigations connected to the
trial of John Demjanjuk.
Demjanjuk, also age 90, is currently
on trial in Munich on charges of being an accessory to the
murder of 28,060 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor death camp
in occupied Poland. He denies he was ever a camp guard.
Prosecutors allege that both Kunz
and Demjanjuk trained as guards at the Trawniki SS camp.
google.com
|