A former Nazi concentration camp guard on Tuesday said at his trial that he was ashamed at having been part of the SS and that he was unaware of the systematic killings there.
Johann Rehbogen is accused of complicity in mass murder at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland.
Dressed in a dark gray suit, the white-haired 94-year-old was wheeled into the German court, holding a walking stick in his right hand.
In rare testimony in one of the last cases of its kind, Rehbogen said in a statement read out by his lawyer that he was forced into service and denied having ever been a Nazi.
“I’m of course ashamed to have been part of the SS, but I still don’t know today if I would have had the courage to do otherwise,” he said.
He said he was forced into joining the SS as he feared “reprisals against my family if I hadn’t gone.”
“When I saw the detainees I knew that the SS was wrong, but I didn’t have a choice to do otherwise,” said Rehbogen, who served as a guard from June 1942 to September 1944 at Stutthof.
He denied knowledge of the gruesome crimes at the camp.
“I knew nothing of the systematic killings, I knew nothing of the gas chambers, as well as the crematoria,” he said.
Rehbogen said he “would have liked to leave” the camp, but added that “I did not trust myself to speak with anyone and had no one I could trust.”
“I will only say that I am not a Nazi, I never have been one, and never will be,” he added.
However, lead prosecutor Andreas Brendel said that there were “ways out” of serving at the camp for guards such as Rehbogen.
“We believe that the guards knew a lot more than what has been recounted today,” Brendel said.
Plaintiffs voiced dismay at Rehbogen’s statement.
“I am disappointed, but not surprised to hear the defendant is denying that he took part in the killings at Stutthof,” said Benjamin Cohen, who represented his grandmother, Judy Meisel, at the hearing. “My grandmother’s account of her time in the camp and the murder of her mother tells a very clear story about the role of these guards.”
“His statement was absurd. I don’t believe him,” said Manuel Mayer, a lawyer of a former detainee.
Rehbogen is due to reply to plaintiffs’ questions when the trial resumes today.
Rehbogen was aged 18 to 20 at the time and is therefore being tried under juvenile law.
He is charged with being an accessory to the murders of several hundred camp prisoners.
These included more than 100 Polish prisoners gassed in June 1944 and “probably several hundred” Jews killed from August to December 1944 as part of the Nazis’ so-called “Final Solution.”
If found guilty, he faces a jail sentence of up to 15 years. Given his age and the possibility of an appeal he is considered unlikely to serve any time behind bars.
Rehbogen, from North Rhine-Westphalia state, is a retired landscape architect and divorced father of three, German media reported.
At the trial opening last week, he shed tears when he heard written testimony from Holocaust survivors.
“A punishment would be symbolic for such an old man, but that’s important in times like now when nationalism and anti-Semitism are returning,” said Christoph Ruecken, a lawyer representing an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who now lives in the US. “It’s important to show that the rule of law says you will face the court if you do these things.”
Stutthof was set up in 1939 and ended up holding 110,000 detainees, 65,000 of whom perished, according to the Museum Stutthof.
Germany has been racing to put on trial surviving SS personnel, after the legal basis for prosecuting former Nazis changed in 2011 with the landmark conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS