94-year-old former SS sergeant charged with 3,681 counts of accessory to murder at Auschwitz (updated)

Update  Feb. 24, 2015:

Former SS man who worked at Auschwitz main camp which has the sign “Arbeit Macht Frei”

Quote from this news source:

Identified only as Hubert Z., a photo of him [shown above] in his Nazi S.S. uniform – emblazoned with the death’s head skull and double-lightning insignia of the feared military group – emerged today.

According to prosecutors in the city of Schwerin, north Germany, the now elderly man was a medical officer at Auschwitz.

He has been charged with complicity in the murders of 3,681 people with officials confident of a successful prosecution.

He is believed to have been an S.S. Unterscharfuehrer (junior squad leader) at the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where at least 1.1 million people, most of them Jewish, were systematically murdered during the Second World War.

The indictment against Hubert Z., who lives in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – the home state of Chancellor Angela Merkel – runs to 83 pages.

It is understood he was tracked down with the aid of the Simon Wiesenthal Nazi hunting agency in Israel and the Central Authority for the Prosecution of Nazi War Crimes in Germany.

“It is our contention that he underwrote the mass murder programme while in Auschwitz,” said a prosecutor.

It is known that the accused was born in the state where he lives and learned agriculture at college before he joined the S.S. in 1940.

He served as a medical orderly in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme in Germany before being sent to Auschwitz where his service records show that he commanded the S.S. medical service between 15 August and 14 September 1944.

End quote

My comment:  Note that Hubert Z. has a degree in agriculture and that he “underwrote the mass murder program”.  It’s been 70 years since he allegedly committed these crimes. Are the Jews getting him mixed up with  Heinrich Himmler, who also had a degree in agriculture and a first name that starts with an H.  How was such a low-level officer in the SS allowed to “underwrite” mass murder in the Auschwitz main camp, at a time when the gas chamber had been converted into a bomb shelter for the SS men?

Continue reading my original post:

A news story in the Guardian newspaper, which you can read in full here, claims that a former SS soldier will be put on trial for accessory to murder for the deaths of 3,681 people in the Auschwitz gas chamber.

The news article does not say that the murders took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but at Auschwitz, which I interpret to mean the main camp at the Auschwitz complex.   The photo that accompanied the article shows the main Auschwitz camp, which had a gas chamber, until it was converted, in 1944, to a bomb shelter for the SS men.

The gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp after it was converted into a bomb shelter

My 1998 photo shows the SS hospital in the background with the roof of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp in the foreground

The entire news article is quoted below.

Begin quote:

Auschwitz suspect charged in Germany on 3,681 counts
Former SS sergeant charged with 3,681 counts of accessory to murder in Nazi extermination camp.

German prosecutors have charged a 94-year-old man with 3,681 counts of accessory to murder over allegations he served in the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.

Stefan Urbanek, a spokesman for prosecutors in Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said on Monday that the suspect was an SS sergeant who served as a medic in an SS hospital in Auschwitz. In that role, Urbanek said the man helped the extermination camp function and could thus be charged as an accessory to the 1944 killings.

The SS hospital in the Auschwitz main camp in the background with the gas chamber in the foreground

Urbanek would not release the suspect’s name, in line with privacy laws.

The man is one of 30 former Auschwitz suspects against whom federal investigators recommended in 2013 that state prosecutors pursue charges under a new precedent in German law.

The suspect’s lawyer, Peter-Michael Diestel, told the Bild newspaper that there was no evidence of any “concrete criminal act” by his client.

End quote

Someone please help me out here.  This man was an SS soldier who was working as a medic in the SS hospital, which was across the street from the Auschwitz gas chamber.

Were Jews taken to the SS hospital to be gassed in 1944 after the gas chamber was converted into a bomb shelter?

The photo below shows that the main Auschwitz camp is quite small.  The white building in the center was the camp kitchen.

Aerial view of the Auschwitz main camp, which was quite small

The prisoners in the main camp were mostly political prisoners and illegal combatants.  There were very few Jews in the main Auschwitz camp.  I doubt that there were 3,681 Jews in the main camp at any time in the camp’s history.  Besides that, how is the exact number of Jewish deaths in the main camp known? The Nazis did not keep records of the names of people who were gassed.