91-year-old woman charged over complicity in 260,000 murders at Auschwitz
A 91-year-old woman has been charged with 260,000 counts of accessory to murder, over killings at Auschwitz concentration camp under the Nazis.
The former worker at the concentration camp, where people from across Europe were sent to die by the Nazis during the Second World War, has been accused in connection with events between April to July 1944.
The woman, who has not been named, belonged to an all-female unit at the camps.
Despite being aged 91 today, she will be tried as a minor – as she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes.
A court will decide next year whether to proceed with the trial, given her advanced age.
Homosexuals were persecuted by the Nazis, and sent to camps alongside a number of other minority groups.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, over a million German men were targeted by the Nazis for threatening the “disciplined masculinity” of Germany, and over 100,000 were arrested under a law criminalising homosexuality.
Approximately 50,000 served prison sentences as “convicted homosexuals”, and around 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps. Many gay men were imprisoned by the Allied authorities following the liberation of the concentration camps, as homosexuality remained illegal.
Memorials to gay victims appear in Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Sydney, Tel Aviv and San Francisco.
A 94-year-old man who allegedly served in Auschwitz was charged with 3,681 counts of accessory to murder earlier this year.
