http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11808994 22 November 2010 Last updated at 12:21 ET German Nazi suspect Samuel Kunz dies ahead of trial Samuel Kunz was accused of being a guard at Belzec death camp in occupied Poland Continue reading the main story Related storiesA Nazi suspect indicted on charges of involvement in the murders of 430,000 Jews at Belzec death camp has died in Germany aged 89. Samuel Kunz was third on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi war crimes suspects and had been due to go on trial early next year. He was also accused of personally shooting dead 10 Jews at the camp in occupied Poland during 1942-43. State Prosecutor Andreas Brendel said Kunz died at home last Thursday. The cause of death was not clear. SS training camp Kunz had admitted working at Belzec and had been called as a witness in the trial of alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, 90, who was deported from the US in 2009. Prosecutors allege that both men trained at the SS camp at Trawniki. Kunz was accused of moving Jewish victims from trains at Belzec, pushing them into gas chambers and throwing their bodies into mass graves. He was also alleged to have shot dead two people who had escaped from a train and killed eight others who had been wounded. Mr Brendel, who is head of the Dortmund-based centre for investigating Nazi war crimes, told the BBC News website that Kunz had been due to go on trial in January or February next year. He said that his department had spent the whole year working on the case. He added that work was continuing on a number of other cases but it was not clear whether any would come to court. Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's unit for hunting down Nazi war criminals, said it was very important that Kunz had been indicted. "At least a small measure of justice was achieved," he said. Mr Demjanjuk, 90, went on trial last year on charges of assisting in the murder of 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp. He denies the charges. Samuel Kunz, Nazi Suspect, Dead Before Germany Trial DAVID RISING | 11/22/10 10:08 AM | 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. Story continues below Advertisement "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. |
--
Being happy–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro
No comments:
Post a Comment