German police on Monday arrested an alleged former guard at the Auschwitz death camp. Prosecutors in the southwestern city of Stuttgart did not name the man, although they said he was 93. The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center named him as Hans Lipschis, and said he was fourth on its list of most wanted Nazi criminals. Sututtgart prosecutors said police took the 93-year-old man into custody in Aalen after prosecutors concluded there was "compelling evidence" that he had been complicit in murder. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said it welcomed the arrest. "The arrest of Lipschis is a welcome first step in what we hope will be a large number of successful legal measures taken by the German judicial authorities against death camp personnel and those who served in the Einsatzgruppen [mobile killing units]," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in an emailed statement. The arrest was made possible by the 2011 conviction in Munich of Sobibor death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk, the first Nazi war criminal convicted in Germany, without evidence of a specific crime or a specific victim, the center's email said. Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. mechanic, died in March last year, aged 91. A Munich court convicted him in 2011 for his role in the killing of 28,000 Jews as a Nazi death camp guard. Lipschis, interviewed in German newspaper Die Welt last month, said he had been a cook in Auschwitz and had left the camp to fight on the Eastern Front, although he could not remember in which unit he served. Stuttgart prosecutors said the man arrested on Monday had worked at the extermination camp from 1941 until its liberation in 1945. Authorities had searched his flat, taken him into custody and were preparing charges against him, they said. The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, at Auschwitz, near the village of Oswiecim in southwestern Poland. News of the arrest came on the same day that the surviving member of a German neo-Nazi cell went on trial for a series of racist murders that have scandalized Germany and exposed the security services' inability or reluctance to recognize far-right crime.
German police arrest alleged former Auschwitz guard
Hans Lipschis, 93, allegedly a guard at the Auschwitz death camp, is arrested in Stuttgart for war crimes • Simon Wiesenthal Center welcomes arrest, says Lipschis was fourth on its list of most wanted Nazi criminals.
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