• Hans Lipschis, 93, is accused of working at Auschwitz from 1941 to 1945
• Says he was unaware of the wholesale slaughter, saying he was just a cook
• But paperwork shows he was member of SS's feared Death’s Head Battalion
• Comes after conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011
• It set precedent making it enough to have just served at extermination site
  

By Allan Hall

PUBLISHED: 08:21 EST, 26 April 2013 | UPDATED: 08:26 EST, 26 April 2013

German prosecutors have started proceedings against a former Auschwitz death camp guard in a last ditch bid to bring 50 former SS men to trial before they die peacefully of old age.

Hans Lipschis, 93, is expected to be the first person brought to court after investigations were launched by German officials several weeks ago into the Auschwitz guards who escaped scot free after WW2.

Prosecutors in Stuttgart this week confirmed the criminal probe launched against him.

Lipschis, who was born in Lithuania in 1919 and was granted 'ethnic German' status in 1943, is accused of working at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a member of the S.S. from 1941 to 1945. He is suspected of participating in murder and genocide.

Lipschis’ name was added a few weeks ago to a list of wanted Nazi criminals published by Dr Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's office in Israel.

Over 1.2 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland during the war.

A German newspaper tracked Lipschis down to a retirement home near Stuttgart where he denied the charges, claimed he knew nothing about the horrors committed at the extermination camp and said he was a 'cook for the entire time I was there.'

But paperwork has surfaced that shows he was a member of the SS–Totenkopf Sturmbann, or Death’s Head Battalion, which guarded the camp.

These were the men who also supervised the unloading of the trains which brought the doomed victims from all over Europe to Auschwitz.

In the past German prosecutors have relied on eyewitness testimony or paperwork when bringing murder charges against suspected war criminals.

But the conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011 in Munich set a new precedent whereby it was enough for people to have served at a site of mass extermination without specific acts being proved.

In 1956 Lipschis fled to the United States and lived in Chicago for 26 years, but was deported to Germany in 1983 after being identified by the U.S. as a Nazi war criminal.

Because of the precedent set in the Demjanjuk case, prosecutors are planning to put him on trial without any specific knowledge of what he did during his time there.

'It is almost certain that he will be the first to be brought to court,' stated the German newspaper Die Welt.

Kurt Schrimm, who heads the German office for investigating Nazi crimes, said the investigations had already led to information about numerous suspects, all of whom reside in Germany and are about 90 years old.