Gruesome charges against Nazi guard

This photo made available by Yad Vashem Photo Archive in Jerusalem shows Nazi guards at Belzec death camp in occupied Poland in 1942. Photo / AP.

BERLIN: The world's third most wanted Nazi suspect was involved in the entire process of killing Jews at the Belzec death camp: from taking victims from trains to pushing them into gas chambers to throwing corpses into mass graves, a German court says.

Samuel Kunz, an 88-year-old who has lived undisturbed for decades, was indicted last week on charges of involvement in the killing of 430,000 Jews - after a career as an employee in a Government ministry and obscurity in a quiet village just outside the former West German capital of Bonn.

Yesterday the Bonn court that indicted him revealed more details of the charges, describing in gruesome detail some of the crimes the suspected former death camp guard allegedly committed in occupied Poland from January 1942 to July 1943.

"The accused was deployed in all areas of the camp," said Bonn court spokesman Matthias Nordmeyer.

Kunz's case only recently came to the attention of the authorities and the world's major Nazi-hunting organisation, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, when prosecutors were poring through World War II-era documents as they built their case against retired motor industry worker John Demjanjuk, now being tried in a high-profile case in Munich.

The discovery prompted the Wiesenthal Centre to list Kunz in April as the world's No 3 most wanted Nazi because he was allegedly involved personally in the killings and because of the "enormous scope" of the killings, said the centre's chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff.

The court also announced on Thursday that Kunz had been charged in a German youth court because he was a minor at the time - meaning he could be brought to trial as an adolescent and face a more lenient sentence.

Kunz was 20 when he allegedly started working as a guard at Belzec in January 1942. According to German law, people between 18 and 21 can be brought to trial either as minors or adults.

"It will be up to the judge to decide whether he will be sentenced as an adolescent or an adult," Nordmeyer said.

The court said that after the victims arrived by train at the death camp, they were told that before they could start working they had to be deloused and take a shower.

"Threatening them with pistols, whips and wooden clubs, the victims were told to hurry up ... They had to undress ... the women had their hair cut off, and then first the men, then women and children were pushed into the gas chambers," the statement said.

After the Jews were killed, "the corpses were searched for gold and valuables and then thrown into prepared graves".

Kunz had long been ignored by the German justice system, with authorities in the past showing little interest in going after relatively low-ranking camp guards. But in the past 10 years, a younger generation of German prosecutors has emerged which wants to bring all surviving Nazi suspects to justice.

- AP