An 88-year old former Nazi death camp guard accused of participating in the murder of 430,000 Jews has been charged in a youth court because he was a minor at the time.
It has yet to be decided whether Samuel Kunz, a retired civil servant, who is No 3 on a list of most-wanted former Nazis, will be tried as a minor – which would attract a lesser sentence – or as an adult. He has been charged as a minor because he was under 21 at the time that the extermination programme for Polish Jews, Operation Reinhard, began in January 1942.
"The accused has been indicted on three criminal charges," said Christoph Goeke of Dortmund's state prosecutors. "Firstly, participation in the murder of 430,000 people in the death camp Belzec [in occupied Poland], secondly the single-handed murder of eight people, and thirdly the murder of two people."
Kunz, who lives close to the western German city of Bonn was informed about the charges last week.
Kunz, whose family is ethnic German, was born in August 1921 on the River Volga in Russia, and joined the red army. During the second world war he was captured by the Germans and given the choice of being interned at a POW camp or working with the Nazis.
He allegedly chose the latter and attended the SS training camp at Trawniki in Poland. He subsequently served as a camp guard at Belzec which was a centre of the extermination programme between January 1942 to July 1943 in which a total of 434,508 Jews were murdered, most of them gassed, according SS own records.
Belzec was seen as a murder factory to where prisoners were brought to be killed immediately. It was run by only around a dozen SS men and as many as 120 so-called helpers from Trawniki.
After the war Kunz applied for German citizenship. He worked as a technician for the building ministry. He has so far refused to comment on the charges. He has not been taken into custody because authorities see little danger that he will try to flee.
Investigators began questioning Kunz in January after his name came to light amid preparation for the trial of 90-year-old John Demjanjuk.
Demjanjuk is charged with taking part in the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. His trial in Munich, at which Kunz has also been called as a witness, is expected to last until December.
Kunz has given evidence at several trials since the 1960s, all related to Trawniki, but until now has never faced charges.
Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called Kunz's indictment a "positive reflection" of the way in which "the German prosecution policy has considerably widened the circle of suspects".
