Ernst Tremmel, Nazi War Crimes Suspect, Dies Days Before Trial
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Version 0 of 1. BERLIN — A 93-year-old former SS storm trooper who worked at the Auschwitz death camp in 1942 and 1943 has died, a week before the opening of his trial on charges of complicity in the killings of at least 1,075 prisoners transported to the camp. The court in Hanau, just east of Frankfurt, did not give the cause of death in a statement Thursday. The former storm trooper, Ernst Tremmel, was said to have handled the three train transports from Berlin, Drancy in France and Westerbork in the Netherlands between Nov. 1, 1942, and June 25, 1943. He was one of a handful of nonagenarians belatedly charged by the German authorities with complicity in the murders of Holocaust victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Another man’s trial in Neubrandenburg, north of Berlin, is in limbo because he is said to be ill; a third trial, of the former SS guard Reinhold Hanning, accused of complicity in 170,000 deaths, is proceeding. A 93-year-old woman said to have worked as a radio transmitter in Auschwitz is also expected to face trial this year. Mr. Tremmel never broke his silence about what he did in the SS, said Christoph Heubner, a vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, a nongovernmental group in Berlin. He had been readying an open letter to Mr. Tremmel asking him to disclose what happened to him as a young man. “For young people today, that would be really important to hear,” Mr. Heubner said when reached by telephone after the announcement of Mr. Tremmel’s death. Now, he said, that is “an appeal that came too late.” |