WASHINGTON (JTA) — A 90-year-old German man was charged with the murders of Jewish slave laborers during World War II.
The man, who has not been identified in most news reports, allegedly served in an SS tank division and is accused of conspiring with his division to commit murders in March 1945. He was charged Tuesday in a German court with 58 counts of murder.
“The indictment claims that the accused was guided by an extremely hostile and inhumane attitude toward the victims equivalent to the Nazi doctrine,” said Stefan Ulrich, a spokesman for the court in Duisburg.
The murders in question are known as the massacre at Deutsch Schuetzen, a small town in Austria.
The Associated Press has identified the man as Adolf Storms, and reported that he was identified by an Austrian graduate student who was researching a paper.
The arrest comes two weeks before the start of the trial of former U.S. citizen John Demjanjuk, 89, a suspected Nazi death-camp guard accused of killing 27,900 people in the Sobibor concentration camp.
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