A former SS guard wept in the dock on the first day of his trial for complicity in mass murder at a Nazi concentration camp during the second world war.

The 94-year-old German from the western district of Borken, in the North Rhine-Westphalia state, served as a guard from June 1942 to September 1944 at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdańsk in Poland.

On Monday, the defendant, identified only as Johann R, entered the regional court of Münster in a wheelchair, with the aid of a walking stick, to face charges of being an accessory to the murders of several hundred camp prisoners.

These included more than 100 Polish prisoners gassed in June 1944 and “probably several hundred” Jews killed between August and December 1944 as part of the Nazis’ Final Solution.

Initially composed, the defendant wept when the testimony of Holocaust survivors was read out by their lawyers.

Marga Griesbach recalled, according to the German news agency DPA, how she saw her six-year-old brother for the last time in the camp before he was sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Another survivor and co-plaintiff, a woman from Indianapolis in the US, alleged the defendant “helped to murder my beloved mother, whom I have missed my entire life”.

The defendant, who is being tried under juvenile law because he was aged between 18 and 20 at the time of the alleged crimes, is “accused in his capacity as a guard of participating in the killing operations”, the Dortmund prosecutor, Andreas Brendel, told AFP.

“Many people were gassed, shot or left to die of hunger,” he added, stressing that the guards “knew about the killing methods”.

When interrogated by police in August 2017, the accused said he knew nothing about the atrocities in the camp, the newspaper Die Welt reported. Asked why camp detainees were so thin, he reportedly said that food was so scarce for everyone that, figuratively speaking, two soldiers could fit into one uniform.

Stutthof, set up in 1939, would go on to hold 110,000 detainees, 65,000 of whom died, according to Stutthof Museum.

Each court hearing will likely last for a maximum of two hours due to the defendant’s age, though Brendel said “mentally, he is still fit”. The defendant was planning to make a statement during the course of the trial, his lawyer told DPA.

If found guilty, he faces a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. But given his age and the possibility of an appeal, it is unlikely he will be jailed.

Brendel noted that German law has no statute of limitations on murder and pointed to the moral imperative to pursue the case. “Germany owes it to the families and victims to prosecute these Nazi crimes even today,” he said. “That is a legal and moral question.”

Germany has been racing to try surviving SS personnel, after the legal basis for prosecuting former Nazis changed in 2011 with the landmark conviction of the former death camp guard John Demjanjuk.

He was sentenced not for any atrocities he personally committed, but that he aided the Nazis by serving at the Sobibór camp in occupied Poland. German courts subsequently convicted Oskar Groening, an accountant at Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at the same camp, for mass murder. However, both men, convicted at age 94, died before they could be imprisoned.