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AFP
Tens of thousands of people were killed in Mauthausen
German prosecutors accused a 95-year-old man of contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands of detainees at an Austrian Nazi death camp.
Identified only by Hans H for legal reasons, the Berlin resident was said to have been a guard at Mauthausen from the middle of 1944 to the beginning of 1945.
A statement from the Berlin prosecutor's office accuses him of being part of the assassination operation.
He is the lastborn of several former death camp guards to be tried.
Half of the 190,000 people detained in Mauthausen, the largest Nazi death camp in Austria, were killed. Hans H is accused of being an accomplice in the death of 36,223 of them.
The camp, located 20 km from the city of Linz, housed those who were considered enemies of the Nazi authorities.
Many were victims of hard labor, gassing, bullet wounds, injections, starvation or cold weather.
According to the prosecutor, the accused, who served in a Nazi SS unit, was aware of "all the methods of murder as well as the disastrous living conditions of the prisoners in the camp".
According to him, he supported or, at least, facilitated "the thousands of deaths of the main perpetrator".
It is now up to a Berlin court to decide whether his case is judged.
Mauthausen was the largest Nazi extermination camp in Austria
Other recent cases include that of 94-year-old Johann Rehbogen, who was tried on 6 November on charges of complicity in large-scale killings in the Stutthof camp in northern Poland.
Another court case concerns a former 94-year-old SS guard accused of aiding and abetting mass murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A Mannheim court is deciding whether a trial should be held.
Learn more about Auschwitz and the Holocaust:
Oskar Groening and Reinhold Hanning, both 94, both in Auschwitz, were found guilty but died before being sent to prison.
The legal basis for judging former death camp guards changed in 2011 with the conviction of John Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.
His trial opened the possibility of prosecuting former guards, who had participated in a death camp operation, without charging them with direct involvement in atrocities.
