The defendant, identified only as Josef S., is charged with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder.
A 100-year-old man and alleged former Nazi SS guard stood trial Thursday for being an accessory to murder during World War II. The man, who was only identified as Josef S. — as dictated by German privacy rules — allegedly worked at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, about a mile from Berlin, and is charged with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder, The Associated Press reports. Josef, who is being tried in Brandenburg, allegedly worked at the camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing. Despite his age, the defendant has been deemed fit to stand trial, albeit with the hours of each court session limited. Scholars estimate that anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 inmates were killed at the camp, out of the more than 200,000 held there between 1936 and 1945.
