Photos Show Auschwitz, on the Weekend

(AP) - German prosecutors formally charged John Demjanjuk today with 27,900 counts of being an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp during World War II, reports the AP. The 89-year-old retired auto worker, who was deported from the US in May, faces 15 years for every count. Prosecutors accuse Demjanjuk of serving as a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943, but he insists he spent the war in prison. More»

Death camp doctor who decapitated Jewish teen heads the list

(NEWSER) - A doctor at barbaric Mauthausen concentration camp heads the list of the 10 most-wanted Nazis sought by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, AP reports. Aribert Heim, 93, is believed to be living in South America, and has a $485,000 reward on his head. One witness recalled how the physician-butcher decapitated a teenage Jewish athlete and saved his skull for display because of his perfect teeth. More»

Dachau, other German sites say they're running out of cash to support programs

(NEWSER) - Nazi concentration camps need to start charging visitors an entrance fee, those who run them say; subsidies from the German government aren't adequate for upkeep and tour guides for millions of pilgrims who visit every year. The proposal has prompted outrage from German Jews, the London Times reports. More»

Auschwitz Memorial Museum prints Birkenau inmate drawings

(NEWSER) - The Auschwitz Memorial Museum has published a collection of death camp sketches by a mystery inmate of Birkenau that was found stuffed in a bottle. The chilling pencil sketches of the camp, by a prisoner who signed them "MM," show children being torn from the arms of their parents, and a guard smoking a cigarette as gas chamber bodies are loaded onto a truck, reports Der Spiegel. "These sketches are the only work of art made in Birkenau that depict exterminations," said a museum spokesman. The sketches, made in 1943, were discovered four years later near the camp's crematorium by a former prisoner working as a watchman at the site. More»

Klaas Carel Faber can continue to live in freedom in Germany

(AP) - An 89-year-old German man considered one of the most prominent Nazi war crimes suspects alive won't be extradited to the Netherlands and can continue to live in freedom, according to German officials. Klaas Carel Faber was convicted in 1947 of complicity in 22 murders and for aiding the Netherlands' Nazi occupiers during World War II. He was handed a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison, at least until he escaped in 1952, and fled to Germany where he has lived in freedom ever since. More»