Belzec - photo: Jewish Virtual Library

German prosecutors have charged a guard stationed at the Nazi extermination camp in Belzec, near Lublin, eastern Poland, with being responsible for the death of 430,000 people, most of them Jews but also Poles and Roma, during WW II.

The 90 year old Sameul Kunz’s flat was raided by officials in Bonn, western Germany, in January this year. Kurn, a retired civil servant denies any involvement in Belzec. the deaths. He is also charged with deaths of 10 Jews in separate incidents.

"We're pleased that Kunz was indicted and that it's possible to bring Nazi perpetrators to justice years after their crimes were committed," said Efraim Zuroff from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Kunz was a witness in the trial of John Demjanjuk, the retired auto worker who is accused of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder whilst he was a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp, also in Poland. Kunz and Demjanjuk are said to have trained  with each other in an SS centre before being posted to serve in occupied Poland.

Nazi extermination camps, source: Wikipedia

The Belzec extermination camp was the first set up in Poland as part of a Nazi plan – known as Operation Reinhard – to murder Poland’s Jews as the Holocaust moved into its most deadly phase. Almost all those held there perished, one of the reasons, say historians, why Belzec is not as well known an extermination camp as Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. In fact, only one inmate is known to have survived the ordeal.

Belzec was also the first death camp to construct static gas chambers, masquerading as bath houses, with a Star of David painted on the roof.

Kunz, who was a guard at the Belzec death camp from January 1942 to July 1943 and is now number 3 in the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazi suspects.

Kunz’s indictment is part of the process where lower level Nazi officers are being charged with war crimes: previous the process was limited to top level officers and politicians. (pg)