Alleged Nazi Guard, 88, Charged in 430K Killings

(AP)  A suspected former Nazi death camp guard has been charged with participating in the murder of 430,000 Jews and other crimes during the Third Reich, German prosecutors said Wednesday.

Samuel Kunz, 88, was informed last week of his indictment on charges including participation in the murder of 430,000 Jews at the Belzec death camp in occupied Poland, where he allegedly served as a guard from January 1942 to July 1943, prosecutor Christoph Goeke in Dortmund said.

Kunz is also charged with murder over "personal excesses" in which he allegedly shot a total of 10 Jews in two other incidents, Goeke told The Associated Press.

Kunz, who is No. 3 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazi suspects, lives near the western German city of Bonn. When reached by phone, he said he did not want to talk about the allegations and hung up.

Kunz was not detained because officials who interviewed him think that he will not try to flee the country, 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.

Goeke said the case has been sent to the state court in Bonn, where officials were considering whether and when to hold a trial - a standard procedural step in Germany.

Bonn court spokesman Matthias Nordmeyer said the court did not want to comment now on the case.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Kunz participated in the so-called Operation Reinhard to eliminate Polish Jewry.

"The indictment of Samuel Kunz is a very positive development," Zuroff told 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."

Zuroff said Kunz had never previously been on trial over his alleged Nazi-era past and that his name first came up in investigations connected to the trial of John Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk, 90, is currently on trial in Munich on charges 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 the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker who was deported to Germany from the U.S. last year, trained as guards at the Trawniki SS camp.

More on Demjanjuk:

Accused Nazi Camp Guard: I Am a Victim
Doubt Cast on Demjanjuk's Nazi Ties
Demjanjuk Nazi Death Camp Trial Begins
US Man Faces Death Camp Charges in Germany

Kunz, an ethnic German, was born in August 1921 on Russia's Volga River.

During World War II, as a soldier with the Soviet Red Army, 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, said Klaus Hillenbrand, a German 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. In the 1960s he gave testimony as a witness about his time at the death camp in a different trial.

Authorities recently stumbled over Kunz' case when they studied old documents from German post-wars trial about Trawniki in connection with the Demjanjuk trial. After several German media then reported about Kunz' alleged Nazi past, the Dortmund prosecutor's office started an investigation into the allegations, Hillenbrand said.

"During the 1960s, prosecutors were not interested in charging low-ranking guards," Hillenbrand said.

"That changed in the last ten years, when a new generation of prosecutors took over and there's a new way of thinking among them the law itself was not changed, just the interpretation of the law."

Despite a recent push by prosecutors to track down Nazi suspects, their efforts often come too late.

According to media reports, former Nazi SS officer Erich Steidtmann, who had been suspected but never convicted of involvement in World War II massacres, died on Saturday.

Steidtmann was a captain in the Nazi's elite SS force who led several battalions which allegedly carried out the mass murder of Jews, and he was long sought by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

He was investigated several times for his alleged involvement in killings at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and two massacres in the Polish city of Lublin.

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.

[Silesius]

Exactly what was: "Polish" about the Belzec concentration camp? Certainly not the crew, not the commandant, not those who ordered its organization. And why is it that the author when talking about "occupied Poland' does not mention who did the occupying? Why is the author so reluctant to mention the fact that Poland was occupied by Germany and everything about the Belzec camp - except for the prisoners - was German?

[wyodutch]

And when a Russian war criminal hid out in Israel and the Polish government wanted to put him on trial for murdering 1,500 Germans.. Israel refused.
.
BBC News - July 7, 2005: Israel has refused to extradite a Polish-born Jew accused of war crimes against Germans in World War II.
Solomon Morel, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, is said to be responsible for the deaths of up to 1,500 prisoners. Morel commanded a Russian-run camp where Germans were held after the Soviets occupied Poland in 1945. Mr Morel moved to Israel in 1994 when inquiries began in Poland. A previous extradition call was refused in 1998. Israel's Justice Ministry told the BBC that Poland's extradition request had been turned down, but gave no further details.
.
As Harry Truman said... "The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as Displaced Persons as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog."

[wyodutch]

Nov 1945 - No other country in the world has a statute of limitations on crimes against humanity and Israel does not apply this limit to Nazi crimes against Jews. Solomon Morel ran the Swietochlowice-Zgoda camp for ethnic Germans from February to November 1945. A recorded 1538 inmates perished at his hands due solely to their German ancestry during these months. Most of them were women and children. Another Stalinist war criminal currently being harbored by Israel is Nachman Dusanski wanted by Lithuania for the Rainai Forest massacre

[wyodutch]

Nachman Dushanski was a Russian war criminal from the Second World War, known as one of the main individuals responsible for the Rainiai massacre in June 1941. Being a Jew, he fled to Israel after the downfall of the Soviet Union. In 2001, an arrest warrant for Dushanski was issued and Lithuania formally requested that Israel extradite Dushanski. Israel, however, denied the request, having previously also denied other requests for cooperation in the investigation. According to the prosecutors, his victims included anti-Soviet resisters who had sought refuge in area forests to escape persecution by communist authorities.

Dushanski was born in Lithuania. After the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, he began working for the Soviet secret police in 1940, a work he continued for over 30 years.

Succeeding in escaping justice, he died in Israel in 2008, 89 years old.

[URunderarrest]

To think these scum could do such a thing. If they have a conscience they have paid. But to commit these atrocities they must be sociopaths. It makes me sick that a human could participate in such horror and then go about living as though nothing happened. I pray they suffered for their acts of inhumanity and one day some divine power exacts revenge.

[RAS08]

This is what happens when rights are removed one at a time. When choice is abdicated to the government. When personal responsibility is replaced by government oversight. Eventually, perspective changes. Trust in a charismatic figure head promising change is blindly supported by his people, through a misguided message.

[imthaid]

@URunderarrest....you should not speak ill of bush and cheney when they are not here to defend themselves.