A former Auschwitz guard has died days before going on trial, accused of being an accessory to murder.
Ernst Tremmel was a member of the Nazi SS guard team at the Polish death camp between November 1942 and June 1943, during which time at least 1,075 prisoners were gassed to death, prosecutors say.
He allegedly played a part in the deportation of prisoners from Nazi transit camps in Berlin, Drancy in occupied France, and Westerbork in occupied Netherlands.
The 93-year-old’s trial was scheduled to begin on 13 Aril at a court in Hanau near Frankfurt, Germany.
A court spokesman said all trial dates had been cancelled after the police confirmed Tremmel's death on Thursday.
Germany is holding what are expected to be its final trials linked to the Holocaust, in which more than six million people were killed under the Nazi regime.
Two other men and one woman, all in their 90s, are accused of being accessories to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.
The trial of 95-year-old Hubert Zafke, a former Auschwitz medic, and 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning, an Auschwitz guard in the camp’s “Death’s Head” SS division, have begun.
Hanning faces charges of complicity in the murder of 170,000 Holocaust victims between January 1943 and June 1944.
Doctors have ruled that Hanning is psychologically capable of spending only two hours a day in court
Zafke’s trial was suspended for the second time last month due to ill health.
The cases follow the prosecution of former Sobibor Nazi death camp guard, John Demjanjuk, in 2012, and former Auschwitz SS guard, Oskar Gröning, last year.
Both were convicted on the basis that their presence at the death camps meant they were complicit in mass murder.
The two cases marked a change in the attitude of German prosecutors to Holocaust perpetrators. Until 2012, German judges had demanded specific eyewitness evidence directly implicating the accused which, in most cases, proved impossible to find.
Additional reporting by agencies
