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Gruesome charges detailed against suspected Nazi


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 said Thursday.

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.

On Thursday the court in Bonn that indicted him revealed more details of the charges against him, 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," Bonn court spokesman Matthias Nordmeyer told The Associated Press.

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

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

The court also announced Thursday that Kunz has 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.

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