BERLIN
— The world's third most-wanted Nazi suspect, who lived undisturbed
for decades after World War II, has been charged in Germany
with participating in the murder of 430,000 Jews while serving
as a low-ranking guard at a death camp.
Samuel Kunz, 88, had long been ignored by the German justice system, partly because
of a lack of interest in going after relatively minor Nazi
figures. But in the past 10 years, a younger generation of
prosecutors has sought to bring all surviving suspects to
justice.
Authorities recently stumbled over
Kunz's case as they were studying old documents from German
post-wars trials about an SS training camp named Trawniki.
The papers were being reviewed in connection with the trial
of John Demjanjuk, the 90-year-old retired autoworker on
trial in Munich for allegedly serving as a guard at the infamous
Sobibor camp.
Kunz was named the No. 3 suspect in
April by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He ranked fairly low
in the Nazi hierarchy, but he was among the most-wanted suspects
because of the large number of Jews he is accused of helping
to kill.
Kunz had been living quietly at his
home near the western city of Bonn. He received a letter
last week saying he had been charged with three different
cases of participating in the murder of Jews, authorities
said.
He allegedly served as a guard at
the Belzec camp in occupied Poland from January 1942 to July
1943.
In addition to those charges, he is
accused of fatally shooting 10 Jews in two other incidents
related to unspecified "personal excesses," prosecutor Christoph Goeke told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Prosecutors allege both Kunz and the
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who was deported to Germany from
the U.S. last year, trained as guards at Trawniki. In the
1960s, Kunz testified about his time there in a different
trial, but he was never indicted himself.
Reached by phone at his home, Kunz
said he did not want to talk about the allegations against
him and hung up.
Kunz was not detained because officials
who interviewed him did not believe he would try to flee,
a person familiar with the case said. The person spoke on
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to reveal
details of the investigation.
At the top of the Wiesenthal Center
list of most-wanted Nazis is Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian
gendarmerie officer accused of involvement in the deaths
of 1,200 civilians in Serbia. He was questioned in September
by prosecutors in Budapest, where he lives across the street
from a synagogue.
Second on the list is Milivoj Asner,
who served as police chief in Croatia during the war. He
now lives in Austria, which has refused to extradite him
to Croatia on medical grounds.
Kunz's case has been sent to the state
court in Bonn, where officials were considering whether to
hold a trial — a standard procedural step in Germany, Goeke
said from Dortmund.
A spokesman for the Bonn court declined
to comment on the matter.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter
at the Wiesenthal Center, said Kunz participated in the so-called
Operation Reinhard to wipe out Polish Jews.
The indictment "is
a very positive development," Zuroff told the 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."
Kunz, an ethnic German, was born in
August 1921 on Russia's Volga River. As a soldier with the
Red Army during World War II, he was captured by the Germans
and given the choice of either staying at the Chelm prisoner
of war camp or cooperating with the Nazis, according to Klaus
Hillenbrand, an expert who has written several books on the
Nazi period.
Kunz agreed to work with the Nazis
and, after he was trained at Trawniki, was transferred to
Belzec where he served as a camp guard, Hillenbrand said.
After the war, he moved to Bonn, worked
for many years at a federal ministry and was granted German
citizenship.
After several German media outlets
recently reported Kunz's alleged Nazi past in connection
with the Demjanjuk trial, the Dortmund prosecutor's office
started an investigation into the allegations, Hillenbrand
said.
Despite a recent push by prosecutors
to bring charges against Nazi suspects, their efforts often
come too late.
Former Nazi SS Capt. Erich Steidtmann
died Sunday from a heart attack at his home in Hannover.
He had been investigated several times, including for alleged
involvement in killings at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, but
authorities never had sufficient proof to charge him.
Adolf Storms, a 90-year-old former
SS sergeant who was No. 4 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's
list of most-wanted Nazi war crimes suspects, died earlier
this month before he could be brought to trial.
Prosecutors were investigating Storms
in connection with 58 counts of murder for his alleged involvement
in a massacre of Jewish forced laborers in a forest near
the Austrian village of Deutsch Schuetzen.
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