A 90 year old man, identified only as Adolf S., was indicted on Nazi war crimes in Germany. The former member of Hitler’s SS is charged with 58 counts of killing Jewish slave laborers in Deutsch Schuetzen, in Austria.
According to prosecutors he, along with other members of the fifth SS Tank Division "Viking,” devised a plan to rob and murder the Jews. The following day they made good on their plan, taking 57 Jewish slave laborers into the woods, stealing their valuables, and firing bullets into their heads from behind.
The final indictment comes from the allegation that he shot a 58th man who was too exhausted to continue on a forced march.
The massacre at Deutsch Schuetzen, as the case has come to be known, took place in March 1945, during the final weeks of the war in Europe, while the Nazi regime began to collapse and members were driven to desperate measures to hide the atrocities of the Holocaust.
This case comes forth at the same time the case against John Demjanjuk, 89, is scheduled to begin. Demjanjuk is suspected in the accessory to the murders of 27,900 inmates at the Sobibor extermination came. His trial is expected to begin on November 30 and last until May 2010.
Another suspected Nazi criminal is expected to go on trial soon. Heinrich Boere, 88, is on trial in Aachen, Germany for killing three civilians in the Netherlands in 1944, when Germany occupied the Dutch state. Boere is a former Waffen-SS.
Boere claims his trial is illegal since he was previously convicted in the Netherlands. He claims that he cannot be tried again for the same crime, citing double jeopardy. He was originally sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life.
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