Ex-Nazi charged over murders

Former guard Samuel Kunz, 88, had been living undisturbed for decades at his home near Bonn when he received a letter saying he had been charged.

Kunz, who is third on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi suspects, had long been ignored by the German justice system, partly due to a lack of interest in relatively low-ranking camp guards.

But in the past 10 years a younger generation of German prosecutors has emerged interested in bringing all surviving Nazi suspects to justice.

The Wiesenthal Centre's most wanted is Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian police officer accused of involvement in the deaths of 1,200 civilians in Serbia, while second on the list is Milivoj Asner, a police chief in Croatia during the war.

He now lives in Austria, which has refused to extradite him on medical grounds.

While Kunz ranked fairly low in the Nazi hierarchy, he is among the top most wanted due to the large number of Jews he is accused of helping to kill – which the prosecutor's office in Dortmund puts at 430,000.

The highest-profile example of guards facing trial is the case against John Demjanjuk, the 90-year-old retired car worker being tried in Munich for accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.

Kunz's case came to light when authorities stumbled over old documents in connection with the trial of John Demjanjuk.

Kunz's charges include participation in the murder of 430,000 Jews at the Belzec death camp in occupied Poland, where he allegedly served as a guard from January 1942 to July 1943, as well as murder over "personal excesses" in which he allegedly shot 10 Jews.

Kunz was captured by the Germans while serving with the Red Army and given the choice of being a POW or working with the Nazis.