Earlier this year, Gregor Formanek was deemed unfit for trial.
A German appeals court has reversed a lower court’s decision, clearing the way for the trial of a 100-year-old alleged former Nazi concentration camp guard.
German media identified the suspect as Gregor Formanek. He was indicted last year for his alleged role in the deaths of over 3,300 people during his service in an SS guard battalion at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in World War II.
A medical assessment in February concluded the centenarian was physically and mentally incapable of participating in legal proceedings. Consequently, the Hanau district court halted the case.
Following appeals from the prosecutor’s office and co-plaintiffs, the Frankfurt higher regional court overturned this ruling on Tuesday, deeming the medical evaluation insufficient.
Frankfurt Attorney General Torsten Kunze welcomed the decision, highlighting the trial’s historical significance as potentially one of the last of its kind, according to the Frankfurter Rundschau.
German law allows prosecution of individuals who served at Nazi concentration camps as accessories to murders committed there. This legal precedent was established in 2011 with the conviction of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian guard at Sobibor, for complicity in the deaths of 28,060 Jews.
Subsequently, several other former Nazi concentration camp personnel have faced and been convicted in German courts.
Formanek allegedly served in an SS guard battalion at Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. Located north of Berlin, Sachsenhausen held over 200,000 Soviet soldiers, Jews, Roma, and other prisoners between its 1936 construction and liberation in 1945.
Estimates suggest between 40,000 and 100,000 inmates perished at the camp due to forced labor, starvation, executions, and medical experimentation.