Source:
Associated PressBERLIN (AP) -- Former SS sergeant Adolf Storms lived in Germany unnoticed for more than six decades after World War II until an Austrian university student last year came across his name while researching a 1945 massacre of Jewish forced laborers.
The student gave the information to state prosecutors near Storms' hometown of Duisburg, and they have now filed charges against the 90-year-old on 58 counts of murder for the killings near the Austrian village of Deutsch Schuetzen, a German court said.
"On March 29, 1945, the accused and his accomplices brought at least 57 Jewish forced laborers in several groups to a nearby forest area, where they had to give up their valuables and kneel by a grave," the court said in a statement. "The accused and other SS members then cruelly shot the Jewish forced-laborers from behind."
The day following the massacre, Storms is accused of personally shooting another Jew who could no longer walk during a forced march in Austria from Deutsch Schuetzen to the village of Hartberg, the court said.
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Compainion piece:
A look at recent prosecutions of suspected Nazi war criminals in Germany.
- November 2009: Prosecutors file charges against former SS Sgt. Adolf Storms on 58 counts of murder in connection with a massacre of Jewish forced laborers in Austria in 1945.
- October 2009: Heinrich Boere, 87, goes on trial in Aachen charged with the World War II murders of three men in the Netherlands when he was a member of a Waffen SS death squad.
- August 2009: Josef Scheungraber, a 90-year-old former officer in the Nazi army, is convicted of murder for ordering the massacre of 10 civilians in a 1944 reprisal killing in Italy; sentenced to life. Scheungraber has said he plans to appeal.
- July 2009: John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old retired auto worker deported from the U.S., is charged as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where he is accused of serving as a guard. His trial starts in Munich on Nov. 30.
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