(JTA) — State prosecutors in the German city of Dortmund have filed charges against two former SS guards at the Stutthof concentration camp as accomplices to murder.
The defendants, who are in their early 90s, were charged last week with involvement in the murders of hundreds of inmates at the camp near Gdansk, Poland, where more than 60,000 died at the hands of the Nazis, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and archive. The charges were made public Wednesday, after the men were notified.
The men have denied taking part in any killings.
The Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has located 18 survivors of the camp to assist in preparations for trials, according to Efraim Zuroff, the center’s chief Nazi hunter. In a statement, Zuroff urged anyone with information about survivors of Stutthof to get in touch with the center in Jerusalem at www.operationlastchance.org.
The 2011 conviction in Munich of former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk as an accomplice in the murders of nearly 30,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Poland set a precedent in that being a guard at a death camp was sufficient to prove complicity in murder.
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