A WOMAN SUSPECTED of being a Nazi concentration camp guard is under investigation by German authorities following remarks she made in an RTÉ documentary.
Hilde Michnia (93) appeared in Close to Evil last year, during which she revealed her part in a 1945 death march.
German prosecutors are investigating her on suspicion of serving as a Nazi SS guard during World War II and that she was involved in forcing prisoners on one of these marches, during which about 1,400 women died.
Hamburg prosecutors’ spokesman Carsten Rinio said Monday his office had begun the investigation of Hilde Michnia last week after a private citizen had filed a complaint against her as allowed under German law.
She is suspected of serving as a guard in the Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen concentration camps, and having been part of evacuating the latter camp near the end of the war and forcing prisoners to march to the Guben labor camp farther west.
Social worker Hans-Jürgen Brennecke told the Guardian that he filed the charges after seeing the RTÉ documentary.
He noted that Michnia said ‘I was on the death march’ three times in the programme.
“When I realised that no one had done anything yet, I thought, this can’t be,” Brennecke said.
Michnia told Die Welt that she did not take part in executions at the camp, saying: ‘I knew nothing, I was just in the kitchen’.
Meanwhile, a 93-year-old former Auschwitz death camp officer will go on trial in Germany in April charged with at least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.
The German defendant, Oskar Groening, will face charges over the 425,000 people believed to have been deported to the camp in occupied Poland between May and July 1944, at least 300,000 of whom were killed in the gas chambers.
Gathering banknotes
Groening, then a member of the Nazi Waffen-SS, was tasked with counting the banknotes gathered from prisoners’ luggage and passing them on to the SS authorities in Berlin, prosecutors in the northern city of Hanover said when he was charged in September.
For this reason, he was known as the “bookkeeper” of Auschwitz.
The accused also helped remove the luggage of victims so it was not seen by new arrivals, thus covering up the traces of mass killing, according to the prosecutors.
With reporting by AFP and The Associated Press
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