After a previous court ruling which stated 95-year-old Nazi war criminal “Herbert Z” was unfit to face trial for the his alleged part in the mass murders of thousands, a German appeals court has turned the tables. The former SS member will face trial in late February for helping to facilitate the “cruel and insidious killings of at least 3,681” people. The Guardian writes:
The higher court of Rostock in northern Germany deemed Hubert Z fit for trial, reversing a decision by a lower court that considered him too fragile for a legal process.
Z, whose last name is confidential due to German privacy laws, was an SS sergeant at Auschwitz in south-west Poland from October 1943 to January 1944 and acted as one of the camp’s paramedics from 15 August to 14 September 1944, the indictment said.
During that month, at least 14 deportation trains reached the extermination site from as far as Rhodes, Lyon, Vienna and Westerbork in the Netherlands, the prosecutor’s office in Schwerin said.
It is believed Anne Frank and her family arrived to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the time Hubert Z was allegedly helping to exterminate human lives. He has also been convicted of was crimes in other areas and during different periods of the war.
News of Zafke’s trial comes months after Oskar Gröning, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” was sentenced to four years in prison in July, convicted of being an accessory to murder of 300,000 people.
Hubert Z is not the only elderly suspect facing trials for Nazi terrorism.
In September 2015, a 91-year-old woman who was reportedly an SS assistant at Auschwitz, where she was working as a radio operator, was accused of being involved in the deaths of at least 260,000 Jews. Her case in now pending trial in the northern city of Kiel, as a final court ruling on whether she is fit for the hearing is expected in early 2016.
Many believe when it comes to those who assisted in Adolf Hitler’s World War II atrocities, justice served now is “better late than never.”