BERLIN
— Samuel Kunz, one of the world's most-wanted Nazi suspects
who was under indictment on allegations he was involved in
killing hundreds of thousands of Jews at a concentration
camp in occupied Poland, has died, a Bonn court said Monday.
The 89-year-old Kunz died on Nov. 18, the Bonn state court said in a short statement.
Court spokesman Joachim Klages said Kunz died in his hometown,
near Bonn, but did not have details on the cause of death.
Kunz's name had surfaced in past
investigations, but the recent allegations came up in Germany
as prosecutors were poring through World War II-era documents
in preparation for another case, that against the retired
autoworker from Ohio, John Demjanjuk, who is now being
tried in Munich.
The resulting investigation prompted
Simon Wiesenthal Center to list Kunz in April as the world's
third most wanted Nazi due to the fact that he was allegedly
involved personally in the killings and to the "enormous scope" of his suspected crimes, said the center's chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff.
"This is incredibly
frustrating and I would urge the German authorities to
expedite the remaining cases so that justice can be achieved," Zuroff told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Jerusalem, after
learning of Kunz's death.
Still, he said: "He
was under indictment – I think that's very important, I
wouldn't minimize that fact – at least a small measure
of justice was achieved."
Kunz was indicted in July on ten
counts of murder and 430,000 counts of accessory to murder
on allegations he trained at the SS Trawniki camp in occupied
Poland and was sent from there to the Belzec death camp
as a guard from January 1942 through July 1943.
In his indictment, prosecutors
said he was involved in the entire process of killing Jews
at the Belzec death camp: from taking victims from trains
to pushing them into gas chambers to throwing corpses into
mass graves.
In addition to being charged with
participating in the execution of the Holocaust, Kunz was
also accused of "personal excesses" in the alleged shooting of 10 Jews.
"In July 1943, the
defendant is accused of having shot two persons who had
escaped from a train going to the death camp and had been
captured by guards," according to the Bonn court.
Between May and June 1943, he
reportedly killed eight others who had been wounded but
not killed by another guard at Belzec.
"The defendant then
took the weapon from the other guard to shoot the wounded
victims to death," the court said.
Kunz had long been ignored by
the German justice system, with authorities in the past
showing little interest in going after relatively low-ranking
camp guards. But in the past 10 years, a younger generation
of German prosecutors has begun pursuing all people suspected
of involvement in the Holocaust, regardless of rank.
The highest-profile case is that
of Demjanjuk, the 90-year-old retired autoworker accused
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 Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk trained at Trawniki.
Though Kunz was due to testify
in the Demjanjuk case, he backed down after learning he
was under investigation himself.
Among other ongoing cases, prosecutors
are still investigating another Ukrainian, Alex Nagorny,
who testified in the Demjanjuk trial. They are currently
trying to determine whether he is the same person as a
Nagorny implicated by witnesses as a guard who participated
in the killings at Treblinka.
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