The pictures were taken at Dachau, the place he worked for 2 years as an SS guard. The man admitted having fun while working with his unit. He said he used to get along with the prisoners but he didn’t hesitate to report them when it was necessary. Some of them he never saw again but he never questioned it either.
Authorities in Germany are now considering charging the former SS guard, for keeping a photo book of his time spent in the concentration camp, at Dachau.
The 87-year-old men, identified as Horst P., was a SS guard from 1943 until the end of the war.
36,000 people were killed at Dachau between 1933 and 1945 and it was the first Nazi concentration camp. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Istrael reported Horst P., after camp survivors sent in information about him and was shortly identified as a war criminal.
The guard, who lives in Berlin with a partner – 14 years younger than him, had pictures with him in uniform at Dachau. Adolf Hilter’s Mein Kampf was written over the photos, the Mail Online reports.
According to a newspaper in Germany, the man said that he wanted to join the SS because they told him it would be fun working with them. As he talked about his time there, you could easily tell he did have fun.
Horst recalled spending everyday with the prisoners, playing cards with them and eating the same food they were given, sometimes there was even some kind of friendship between them. However, he didn’t talk about murdering millions of Jewish people, or about the medical experiments carried out on Jewish people by air force doctors who tried to test the effect of freezing water on the human body.
He insisted that he got along with the prisoners but if one of the ‘criminals’ did something wrong, he would report him and he would be transferred to a different prison and sometimes never come back. But the reason for which he never questioned it was so they wouldn’t think he had anything to do with them.
He also said that he couldn’t help them if they were stupid and refused to obey. He didn’t want to help them, he just wanted to stay alive.
From 1933 to 1945, there were 200,000 prisoners at Dachau, from 38 countries and at least 30,000 were killed or starved to death. Prisoners were forced to work, sleep and live in horrific conditions and if they didn’t obey, they were beaten to death.