An 84-year-old Polish pensioner is facing war crimes charges for having allegedly handed over information to Nazi officials which led to the arrest and shooting of eight Polish Home Army (AK) resistance partisans during World War Two.
The Polish PAP news agency reported on Thursday that Poland's IPN war and communist crimes prosecutors in Krakow, southern Poland, pressed the charge against a suspect identified only as Piotr W.
IPN prosecutors found that the man who hailed from the ethnically Germanic Silesian region of pre-war Poland deserted the Nazi German army and then joined the Polish AK resistance.
He allegedly began to co-operate with the Nazis after being arrested by the notorious Gestapo police. Information provided by him led to the arrest and killing of eight Polish partisans on 6 August 1944, IPN prosecutors allege.
The suspect who lives in the southern Polish city of Katowice has denied any wrongdoing, but WWII eyewitnesses have identified him as having been responsible for informing on partisans, an act which condemned them to certain death. Any form of anti-Nazi resistance activity in Nazi-occupied Poland was punishable by death.
If found guilty the man could face life in prison.
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