Trial of Auschwitz medic stalls amid legal wrangling

NEUBRANDENBURG, Germany (WJC)– The trial of a former medical orderly at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau resumed on Monday in Neubrandenburg, north of Berlin, with a call on the judge to recuse himself.

Hubert Zafke as SS officer during World War II

Hubert Zafke as SS officer during World War II

Hubert Zafke, 95, is accused of having been an accessory to the murder of 3,681 people between August and September 1944. The charges involve the deaths of Jews who arrived in 14 train transports, among them one that brought Anne Frank and her family to the camp. Frank died later at Bergen-Belsen, and Zafke is not charged over her death.

However, prosecutors allege that Zafke’s unit was involved in putting gas into gas chambers to kill Jews and others, screening blood and other samples from female prisoners, and otherwise helping the camp run by treating SS guards. They say the unit was also involved in auxiliary guard duties.

The case continues to spark criticism in Germany, with the court apparently preferring the trial not be held.

It has already been suspended four times since February following concerns over the defendant’s health, and no evidence has been presented to the court until now. On Monday, prosecutors tabled a motion for judge Klaus Kabisch to recuse himself, after a previous application by civil plaintiffs was rejected. On the bench, the judge stifled a yawn as the prosecutors argued their case to get him replaced, according to the news agency AFP.

According to the prosecution, Kabisch is biased because he had been unwilling to start the trial in the first place due to Zafke’s poor health, before being overruled by a higher court.

“The co-plaintiffs have abandoned all hope that a trial that is anything other than a farce will actually start one day under this presiding judge,” lawyers representing co-plaintiffs said in a statement last week.

Over the last few hearings, a parade of doctors have been quizzed in court about Zafke’s mental health, with each reaching a different conclusion.

The International Auschwitz Committee also sharply attacked Germany’s handling of the case, saying the court was hurtling “between sloppy ignorance and complete disinterest.”

“The justice system has rarely offered a spectacle that is so undignified,” the news magazine ‘Der Spiegel’ wrote, noting the sharp contrast with the previous three trials of SS personnel in Germany recently.

In February, Zafke’s attorney Peter-Michael Diestel, who served as the German Democratic Republic’s last interior minister before re-unification with West Germany in 1990, denounced what he called a “humanely troubling” and “politically dubious” effort to convict his client. “I consider it extremely distressing that the German justice system, which has only spottily addressed the Holocaust, is trying to create a fig leaf for itself with this kind of trial.”

*
Preceding provided by World Jewish Congress