A 94-year-old former SS guard went on trial in Germany on Tuesday over the killing of hundreds of Jewish and Polish prisoners during the Second World War.
In what may prove to be the last Holocaust trial, Johann Rehbogen is accused of being an accessory to the murder of hundreds of prisoners at Stutthof concentration camp, in modern Poland.
Dr Rehbogen has admitted that he served as an SS guard at the concentration camp but denies knowing anything of what went on inside, according to prosecutors.
“I was never a Nazi,” he told Welt newspaper in 2017.
There are no pleas in the German legal system, but Dr Rehbogen’s lawyer said his client intended to make a statement at some point during the trial.
The 94-year-old entered the courtroom in the German city of Münster dressed in a green fishing hat and grey coat, and wept as the charges against him were read. As he was aged 18 to 20 at the time of the alleged crimes, he is being tried in a juvenile court.
Because of his age and frailty, hearings in the trial have been limited to two hours and will only be held two days a week.
More than 65,000 prisoners are believed to have been killed at Stutthof concentration camp, close to the Polish city of Gdansk, then known as Danzig.
Although Stutthof was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, thousands of prisoners were murdered there.
A gas chamber was built at the camp in 1944, and other prisoners were killed with injections of phenol to the heart. More than 28,000 Jewish prisoners were among the dead.
There is no specific evidence tying Dr Rehbogen to killings at the concentration camp, but prosecutors argue that by serving as a guard he was an accessory to the crimes committed inside.
He is accused of being an accessory to the murder of hundreds of Polish and Jewish prisoners who were killed during the time he served there, between June 1942 and September 1944.
His trial is the latest in an effort in recent years to bring surviving perpetrators to justice while there is still time.
But Germany has been accused of failing to prosecute senior Nazis while they were still alive, and pursuing relatively minor figures now because they are the only ones left alive.
Oskar Gröning, the 94-year-old “book-keeper of Auschwitz”, was found guilty on 300,000 charges of accessory to murder in 2015.
Reinhold Hanning, a 95-year-old former SS guard at the extermination camp, was convicted on similar charges last year. Both men died before they could begin their sentences.
A case against Hubert Zafke, a 96-year-old former SS medic at Auschwitz, was abandoned last year after he was ruled too unwell to stand trial.
Seventeen survivors of Stutthof concentration camp are taking part in the trial of Dr Rehbogen as co-plaintiffs.
“My clients are not concerned whether this elderly defendant goes to prison,” Onur Özata, a lawyer for two of them, told Bild newspaper. “They want him finally to tell the truth about the crimes that took place in Stutthof.”