'Nazi' charged with 430,000 deaths

GERMAN prosecutors have charged a suspected former Nazi death camp guard with participating in the murder of 430,000 Jews and other crimes during the Third Reich.

Samuel Kunz, 88, was informed last week of his indictment on charges including 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, prosecutor Christoph Goeke in Dortmund said yesterday.

Kunz is also charged with murder over "personal excesses" in which he allegedly shot a total of ten Jews in two other incidents, Mr Goeke said.

Kunz, who is Number three on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi suspects, lives near the western German city of Bonn. When reached by phone, he said he did not want to talk about the allegations and hung up.

Kunz was not detained because officials who interviewed him think that he will not try to flee the country, a person familiar with the case said.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said Kunz participated in the so-called Operation Reinhard to eliminate Polish Jewry.

"The indictment of Samuel Kunz is a very positive development," Mr Zuroff said.

"It reflects recent changes in the German prosecution policy, which have significantly enlarged the number of suspects who will be brought to justice."

Mr Zuroff said Kunz had never previously been on trial over his alleged Nazi-era past and that his name first came up in investigations connected to the trial of John Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk, 90, is currently on trial in Munich on charges of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. He denies he was ever a camp guard.

Prosecutors allege that both Kunz and the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who was deported to Germany from the US last year, trained as guards at the Trawniki SS camp.

Kunz, an ethnic German, was born in August 1921 on Russia's Volga River.

During the Second World War, as a soldier with the Soviet Red Army, he was captured by the Germans and given the choice of either staying at the Chelm prisoner of war camp or co-operating with the Nazis, said Klaus Hillenbrand, a German expert who has written several books on the Nazi period.

Kunz agreed to work with the Nazis and, after he was trained at Trawniki, was transferred to Belzec where he served as a camp guard, Mr Hillenbrand said.

After the war, he moved to Bonn, worked for many years at a federal ministry and was granted German citizenship. In the 1960s he gave testimony as a witness about his time at the death camp in a different trial.

Authorities recently stumbled over Kunz' case when they studied old documents from German post-wars trial about Trawniki in connection with the Demjanjuk trial. After several German media agencies then reported about Kunz' alleged Nazi past, the Dortmund prosecutor's office started an investigation into the allegations, Mr Hillenbrand said.

"During the 1960s, prosecutors were not interested in charging low-ranking guards," Mr Hillenbrand said.

"That changed in the last ten years, when a new generation of prosecutors took over and there's a new way of thinking among them - the law itself was not changed, just the interpretation of the law."

Despite a recent push by prosecutors to track down Nazi suspects, their efforts often come too late.

According to reports, former Nazi SS officer Erich Steidtmann, who had been suspected but never convicted of involvement in Second World War massacres, died on Saturday.

Steidtmann was a captain in the Nazi's elite SS force who led several battalions which allegedly carried out the mass murder of Jews.