German prosecutors charged on Tuesday a 90-year-old former member of Hitler's SS with 58 counts of murder over a massacre of Jewish forced labourers in the final weeks of World War II. 

The man, named only as Adolf S., a member of the fifth SS Tank Division "Viking", is accused of hatching a plot on 28 March 1945 together with other SS and members of the Hitler Youth to shoot the Jewish labourers.

The following day the accused and other SS took at least 57 labourers in several groups into woods near the small town of Deutsch Schuetzen in Hitler's native Austria near the present-day border with Hungary.

There, the Hungarian Jews were stripped of their valuables before being made to kneel down in a ditch. Adolf S. and his accomplices then dispatched them with a bullet from behind, prosecutors said in a statement.

He is also accused of shooting from behind another labourer in nearby Jabing who was too exhausted to continue a forced march of around 100 labourers the same day or the day after, prosecutors said.

Nazi retreat
At the time, with the Allies fast overrunning German territory from all sides, the Nazis were desperately evacuating concentration camps, forcing emaciated prisoners on exhausting marches, killing those too weak to carry on.

Just a month after the Deutsch Schuetzen massacre, Hitler shot himself in his bunker as the Red Army entered Berlin.

A court in Duisburg now has to decide whether the trial of the man, who lives in the western German city, can go ahead. The defendant has two weeks to present evidence or to appeal against the case proceeding.

Prosecutors allege that he was driven by National Socialist ideology that his victims were considered to be "of low value," a spokesman said in the statement.

John Demjanjuk
The announcement came 13 days before alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, 89, was due to stand trial in the southern German city of Munich charged with assisting in the murder of 27,900 people in 1943.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, deported from the United States in May, is number three on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted war criminals, behind two others believed to be dead.

Prosecutors have charged Demjanjuk with being a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943 where hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded to the gas chambers.

Courts in Israel and the United States have previously stated Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor but one of his lawyers in May recently denied he was ever there.

Prosecutors have an SS identity card with a photograph of a young man said to be Demjanjuk and written transcripts of witness testimony placing him at the camp.

Demjanjuk's family insists he is innocent and that he is too ill to stand trial.

Source: AFP