A tenacious prosecutor in Hanover has asked the court to resume the trial of a former SS officer accused of murdering Jews.
The decade-long proceedings were suspended March 18 on grounds of an alleged technical error in jury selection when the trial started in 1981.
The prosecutor, Manfred Endler, said Monday that his office asked that the trial be continued because of the importance of the issues involved.
The defendant, Heinrich Niemeyer, 70, who led an elite SS unit during World War II, is charged with shooting 15 Jews to death while they were being transferred to Auschwitz from another concentration camp in January 1945.
Niemeyer was convicted of murder in 1979 for 10 of the killings. But the verdict was overturned by the appeals court in 1980 on grounds that the trial judges failed to prove the shootings were murder rather than manslaughter.
The new trial, one of the longest Nazi trials in history, was called off after 331 days of proceedings.
The reason was the discovery that some courts in the Hanover area once failed to follow legal guidelines for the selection of jurors, known as assessors under the German legal system.
The assessors are chosen at random from the electoral lists to sit alongside the judges as a form of jury.
Until Endler’s request, legal sources were convinced that the proceedings against Niemeyer would never resume because of his failing health.
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