Never too late for justice: A suspected former Nazi death camp guard, aged 89, has been charged in a German youth court with participating in the mass murder of 430,000 Jews at the Belzec death camp in occupied Poland. Samuel Kunz, the world's third most wanted Nazi suspect according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is accused of guarding in Belzec starting in January 1942 – at the age of 20. German law stipulates that those accused of crimes between ages 18 and 21 can be brought to trial as either minors or adults; the judge then decides whether the convict should be sentenced as an adolescent or an adult. The German authorities decided to try Kunz as an adolescent, giving him hope that his sentence will be relatively lenient. His trial will be held in Bonn, the former capital of what used to be West Germany. Kunz also allegedly served as a guard in the Trawniki-SS training camp. He was discovered during the course of the search for evidence in the case of Sobibor guard Ivan Demjanjuk, who is currently on trial in Germany. At Least Ten Direct Murders In addition to being charged generally with participating in the murder of over 430,000 Jews, Kunz is also accused of murdering ten Jews personally. "In July 1943, the defendant is accused of having shot two persons who had escaped from a train going to the death camp and had been captured by guards," the indictment statement said. In addition, between May and June 1943, he allegedly killed eight Jews who had been wounded but not killed by another guard at Belzec. "The defendant then took the weapon from the other guard to shoot the wounded victims to death," according to the statement. AP reports that Kunz had long been ignored by the German justice system, where former officials were not particularly interested in going after relatively low-ranking camp guards. In the past ten years, however, the younger German prosecutors are actively bent on bringing all surviving Nazi suspects to justice.
