Post date: May 07, 2013 3:33:56 PM
The German city where a suspected former Auschwitz guard had lived for 30 years says it knew nothing about Hans Lipschis' past.
AALEN, GERMANY (MAY 07, 2013) (REUTERS) - One day after German police arrested a suspected former guard at the Auschwitz death camp, the city of Aalen on Tuesday (May 7) said it knew nothing about the past of the man Nazi-hunting group Simon Wiesenthal named as Hans Lipschis.
Aalen mayor Jutta Heim-Wenzler told Reuters Television that "of course I deeply regret that a citizen with such a past was able to live here undetected for so many years."She added that she saw no basis in her city for any extreme right-wing tendencies following the arrest and said she was worried about the town's image now.
"We are a liveable, attractive city where people live very well side by side and there are absolutely no extreme right-wing tendencies," Heim-Wenzler said.
Prosecutors in the south-western city of Stuttgart did not name the man but said police had arrested a 93-year-old alleged former Auschwitz guard with the "strong suspicion" he was involved in murder there.
"The defendant is accused of aiding and abetting murder," state prosecutor Claudia Krauth said in Stuttgart.
"He is accused of having assisted the murders at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He is currently in detention while awaiting trial."
The arrest was made possible by the 2011 conviction in Munich of Sobibor death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk, the first Nazi war criminal convicted in Germany, without evidence of a specific crime or a specific victim, the Simon WiesenthalCenter's email said.
Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. mechanic, died in March last year aged 91. A Munich court convicted him in 2011 for his role in the killing of 28,000 Jews as a Nazi death camp guard.
Lipschis, interviewed in German newspaper Die Welt last month, said he had been a cook in the camp and had left the camp to fight on the Eastern Front, although he could not remember which unit he was in.
Stuttgart prosecutors said the man arrested on Monday had worked at the extermination camp during World War Two, from 1941 until its liberation in 1945. Authorities had searched his flat, taken him into custody and were preparing charges against him.
The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, at Auschwitz, near the Polish village of Oswiecim.
News of the arrest came on the same day the surviving member of a German neo-Nazi cell went on trial for a series of racist murders that have scandalised Germanyand exposed the security services' inability or reluctance to recognise far-right crime.