The state court in Duisburg said prosecutors there have on Tuesday charged a 90-year-old former SS soldier with for the murder of 58 Jewish forced labourers near the town of Deutsch-Schuetzen in Austria on the last days of World War II.
The remains of the victims of the Deutsch Schuetzen massacre were found in 1995 in a mass grave by the Austrian Jewish association. A plaque now marks the site.
The man – reportedly with the rather unfortunate Nazi-sounding name of “Adolf Storms” – has not yet been officially been named by the court but it has been published by the German media.
The Court has said they have two weeks to decide whether the evidence as presented to them by the prosecutors supports the charges sufficiently to bring the case to trial, which is normal practice in Germany. A lawyer acting for Mr Storms issued no immediate response to the charges. nor whether he will appeal against the case proceeding further.
At the time of the murders, March 1945, the retreating Nazis were desperately trying to cover their tracts evacuating concentration camps. They forced weak and hungry prisoners on exhausting marches and killed many who could no longer walk.
Der Spiegel magazine in an article last October reported that state prosecutors were warned about Storms involvement in the killings because of the investigations put in place by a 28-year-old Austrian student, Andreas Forster.
Forster interviewed Storms for several days without telling the elderly man the real nature of his inquiries. He duly informed the proscecutors in July and the police raided his house in December.
Prosecutors have alleged that he not a mere lackey obeying orders but was a driven National Socialist ideologue and considered his victims “of low value” .
In two related incidents in Germany, in October, the 88 year old former SS soldier Heinrich Boere went on trial in the western city of Aachen for gunning down three Dutch resistance fighters in 1944. He admitted responsibility but said he “was just following orders”, which hopefully the court will also do and throw him in jail for the remainder of his life.
And this August, a 90-year-old former German army commander was jailed for the rest of his life for ordering a massacre of Italian civilians in 1944. Troops under his direct command shot a 74-year-old woman and three men in the street before forcing 11 males aged between 15 and 66 into the ground floor of a farmhouse which they then blew up. Only the youngest of the boys survived.
Another open case which has yet to be taken to court concerns a German citizen a certain Soeren Kam. He directly participated in the murder of anti-Nazi Danish newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen.This Danish patriot had stolen the population registry of the Danish Jewish Community which would have facilitated the roundup and subsequent deportation of Danish Jews to Nazi concentration camps, where many were murdered.
Kam was indicted in Denmark for the murder of Clemmensen, but a German court refused to approve his extradition to stand trial in Copenhagen. At the request of the Wiesenthal Center, the Danish judicial authorities are conducting an investigation of his role in the deportation of those Jews.
Hopefully Mr Kam will be joining Mr Boere and possibly Mr Storms in jail very soon.
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