German prosecutors charged one of the world’s most-wanted Nazi suspects with the death of 430, 000 Jews in occupied Poland on Wednesday.
Samuel Kunz, an 88-year-old Nazi guard who worked at the Belzec extermination camp from 1942 to 1943 and is now living in Bonn, was also charged with the shooting of ten Jews in two separate incidents, a German spokesman said.
Kunz, who denies any “personal responsibility,” was third on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of top ten most-wanted Nazis. Although several senior Nazi officials were tried in the years immediately after the war, very few of the “simple soldiers” were ever brought to justice. The international Jewish human rights organization told reporters that this case proves it’s not too late to bring Nazi criminals to justice.
A change in the German prosecution policy however, means that more cases on Nazi murder trials will be heard.
“During the 1960s, prosecutors were not interested in charging low-ranking guards,” Nazi expert Klaus Hillenbrand told the BBC. “That changed in the past ten years when a new generation of prosecutors took over and there is a new way of thinking among them. The law itself was not changed, just the interpretation of the law.”
Although Kunz had reportedly been questioned several times by German investigators in the past, his true identity was only revealed when he served as a witness during the U.S. deportation trial of Ukrainian John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk was allegedly involved in the murder of 27, 900 people at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. The two trained at the same S.S. camp in Trawniki, Poland.
Belzec and Sobibor were two of the four initial death camps established by the Nazis to kill Polish Jews in what came to be known as “Operation Reinhard.” More than 2.5 million Jews were killed by the time the camps were replaced by the mega-killing machine at Auschwitz.
“The indictment of Samuel Kunz is a very positive development,” said the Wiesenthal Center’s Nazi Hunter Efraim Zuroff.
The Center’s fourth most-wanted Nazi, Adolf Storms, died earlier this month before he was brought to court. German officials are now deliberating whether—and when-- they will hold a trial for Kunz.
