Nazi camp guard goes on trial

MUNICH, Germany -- A former guard at a Nazi concentration camp is expected to go on trial in Munich on Monday accused of three counts of murder.

Prosecutors say ex-SS company leader Anton Malloth, 89, sadistically killed two inmates at the Theresienstadt camp, in what is now the Czech Republic, in January 1944.

It is the first trial of a former guard at the camp since it was liberated 56 years ago at the end of World War II.

He is accused of training a powerful jet of water at the naked inmates for half an hour. He is also accused of clubbing a third prisoner to death a few months later.

Witnesses say Malloth also he shot a fourth inmate who tried to steal a cabbage during harvesting work near the camp, although it is not clear whether he killed this victim.

Austrian-born Malloth, against whom a guilty verdict handed down in absentia by a Czechoslavakian court in 1948 was ruled unsafe in 1969, denies all charges.

A butcher by trade after the war, Malloth has lived near Munich in Bavaria since being extradited from Italy in 1988 and has been in detention since last May. Prosecutors say his nationality is unclear.

German authorities have been investigating charges against Malloth for more than 20 years since the original 1948 verdict against him, which carried the death penalty, was quashed on grounds that not all relevant details of the case were covered.

German media attention has been growing towards what are expected to be among the last trials of former Nazis.

Prosecutors in Hamburg are studying whether to try 92-year-old former Nazi SS officer Friedrich Engel for killing at least 246 Italians in 1944 and 1945 in the northwest region of Liguria in reprisal for attacks against Germans.

Engel has already been tried in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment by Italy. Italy confirmed on Friday it had written to the German Justice Ministry stepping up its demand for Engel's arrest.

Earlier this month a German court sentenced ex-SS officer Julius Viel, 83, to 12 years in jail for the murder of seven Jewish prisoners in early 1945 near the Theresienstadt camp.

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German Justice Ministry

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