A former Nazi concentration camp guard has been charged with aiding and abetting at least 5,230 murders during the Second World War.

The 92-year-old man, identified only as Bruno D in German media, is said to have spent nine months on duty at Stutthof near Gdansk in modern-day Poland.

He was indicted after telling prosecutors he saw people taken to gas chambers to be killed, according to the Die Welt newspaper.

“What good would it have done for me to leave? They’d just have found somebody else,” he said during a voluntary interrogation last year.

“I felt bad for the people there. I didn’t know why they were there. I knew that they were Jews who had committed no crime.”

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

The former SS guard claimed he was not a Nazi sympathiser and only joined the party’s paramilitary organisation because a heart weakness restricted him to “garrison service”.

He was a 17-year-old trained baker when he began work at Stutthof concentration camp, where more than 60,000 people, including 28,000 Jews, died.

The former guard began work on 9 August 1944 and remained there until 26 April 1945, three days before Germany surrendered to the Allies.

He is said to have told prosecutors he saw the gas chambers and dead bodies being taken to the crematorium, according to Die Welt.

Asked about the prisoners in the camp, he replied: “They have the same right to live and work like any other person. But that was just Hitler or his party who were against it.”

It will be one of the last ever trials involving Nazi-era war crimes, due to the age and infirmity of the remaining suspects.

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Last year the case against another former guard at Stutthof, Johann Rehbogen, was halted because the suspect was too ill to stand trial, and Oskar Groening, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, died aged 96 before starting his prison sentence.