BERLIN
(JTA) -- Germany has filed charges against a 90-year-old
man for helping murder 430,000 Jews during World War II.
Samuel Kunz, No. 3 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazis,
was charged in Dortmund last week, according to the French
news agency AFP. He reportedly has admitted working in the
Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland.
Kunz, who denies having personally
murdered anyone, also is charged in connection with two incidents
at Belzec in which 10 Jews were killed. He is also a witness
in the war crimes trial against John Demjanjuk, who is charged
as an accomplice in the murders of 27,900 Jews while serving
as a guard at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.
The new case underscores claims by
Nazi hunters, including the Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem
director Efraim Zuroff, that war criminals are living free
more than 60 years after the end of World War II.
Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal
Center in Jerusalem, had long maintainted that those tempted
to call Demjanjuk's case "the last big Nazi trial" were wrong.
Two men under investigation of Nazi-era
war crimes died this month before going on trial. Former
SS officer Erich Steidtmann, 95, accused of leading Nazi
police battalions that committed mass murder of Jews in Eastern
Europe, died this week in Hanover, where he lived.
Adolf Storms, 90, indicted reportedly
for killing 57 Jewish men in Austria in March 1945 at the
end of World War II, died in his home city of Duisburg. He
allegedly forced the men, slave laborers, to hand over their
valuables before he shot them.
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