BERLIN - nonagenarian Auschwitz survivors, including two who recently met François when he visited the former Nazi death camp, asked Germany's highest court to quickly solve the case of a former SS soldier who was convicted of complicity in the murder of 300,000 prisoners.
The German authorities have adopted a more aggressive approach to prosecute suspected Nazi, but "Auschwitz survivors are not as much time as the German justice," said Roman Kent, 90, President of the International Auschwitz Committee, a non-governmental group that unites Holocaust survivors based in New York.
former SS soldier, Oskar Gröning, now 95, was convicted in July 2015 a four-year court in Lüneburg to murder prison while serving in Auschwitz, where he also confiscated the money and jewelry prisoners arriving.
His lawyers and those representing some of the dozens of co-plaintiffs in the case appealed the decision, but the time required to process legal technicalities delayed the arrival of the case to the Court Federal justice, the highest court for civil and criminal cases in Germany.
appeal was officially received on 22 March, said Erna Besirovic, a court official at the court in Karlsruhe.
"the case is pending," she said, without date for a hearing or other action.
M .. Kent and a co-plaintiff Hungarian were part of a group of 80 Holocaust survivors who met the Pope during his recent visit to Auschwitz, said Christoph Heubner, Vice President the International Auschwitz Committee, which is based in Berlin.
He and Mr. Kent said the nonagenarian survivors took some comfort to the late justice in the case of Mr. Gröning and another former SS guard, Reinhold Hanning, who was convicted in June in the city of Detmold, southwest of Hamburg, five years as an accessory to 170,000 cases of murder.
The two men were among dozens whose central office of Germany for the prosecution of Nazi crimes identified as fit and able to stand trial despite their advanced age.
For decades, the former guards at Auschwitz and other camps death escaped prosecution because the German judicial authorities said they could sue only those who were actually related by witnesses or other evidence of specific crimes.
German approach changed after the trial of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor camp who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years and was finally sentenced to five years by a court Munich in 2011.
M .. Demjanjuk died in 2012 before his appeal was heard, so his conviction was not official in the German system.
M .. Heubner, who worked in the International Auschwitz Committee for 20 years, said in a telephone interview that the survivors who had placed a renewed hope in the German court after the trial of M . Gröning and Mr Hanning lose faith again.
The co-complainants had "a great new impression of Germany" Heubner said. Now "it is like being immersed in a cold water bath, suddenly, once again, nothing happens."
Survivors "are very critical of the German courts, including the almost complete inaction with regard to the judgment of the authors SS they had to follow for decades," Heubner said in a statement.
central office for the prosecution of Nazi crimes at Ludwigsburg continues to pursue the case, announcing last week that he would seek the prosecution of four former male guards and four women who worked in Directors at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk, Poland.
But as last week, the judicial authorities have confirmed the finding that a woman of 92 years in Germany in the north, which had served as a radio operator in Auschwitz was not fit to stand trial on charges of complicity in the murder of 260,000 prisoners.
in April, a former SS guard at Auschwitz was to be held in Hanau, near Frankfurt, died a few days before his case was opened.
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