It's "incredibly frustrating" that Samuel Kunz died before trial, says Wiesenthal Center's Efraim Zuroff.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS, JPOST.COM STAFFDr. Ephraim Zuroff311(photo credit: AP)
A court in Germany says the world’s third most-wanted Nazi suspect has died before he could be brought to trial.Bonn’s state court said in a statement Monday that 89- year-old Samuel Kunz died November 18.RELATED:Court rejects bid to ban testimony in Demjanjuk trialIn the name of the mother: Ashes go to TreblinkaKunz was indicted on charges he was involved in the entire process of killing Jews at the Belzec death camp: from taking victims from trains to pushing them into gas chambers to throwing corpses into mass graves.No trial date had been set.The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement in response to the news on Monday afternoon. Efraim Zuroff, the center’s director in Israel, said it was “incredibly frustrating” that Kunz died before trial.“The fact that Samuel Kunz lived in Germany unprosecuted for so many decades is the result of a flawed prosecution policy which ignored virtually any Holocaust perpetrator who was not an officer.It was only the recent, long-awaited change in this policy which led to Kunz’s indictment and the opportunity to hold him accountable for his crimes.“We urge the German authorities to expedite all such cases, given the advanced age of the suspects, so that a measure of justice can still be achieved,” he said.
