A former Auschwitz guard has died days before going on trial, accused of being an accessory to murder.

Ernst Tremmel was a member of the Nazi SS guard team at Nazi camp in occupied Poland between November 1942 and June 1943, during which time at least 1,075 prisoners were gassed to death, prosecutors say.

He allegedly played a part in the deportation of prisoners from Nazi transit camps in Berlin, Drancy in occupied France, and Westerbork in occupied Netherlands.

The 93-year-old’s trial was scheduled to begin on 13 April at a court in Hanau near Frankfurt, Germany.

A court spokesman said all trial dates had been cancelled after the police confirmed Tremmel's death on Thursday.

Germany is holding what are expected to be its final trials linked to the Holocaust, in which more than six million people were killed under the Nazi regime.

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

Two other men and one woman, all in their 90s, are accused of being accessories to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.

The trial of 95-year-old Hubert Zafke, a former Auschwitz medic, and 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning, an Auschwitz guard in the camp’s “Death’s Head” SS division, have begun.

Hanning faces charges of complicity in the murder of 170,000 Holocaust victims between January 1943 and June 1944.

Doctors have ruled that Hanning is psychologically capable of spending only two hours a day in court

Zafke’s trial was suspended for the second time last month due to ill health.

The cases follow the prosecution of former Sobibor Nazi death camp guard, John Demjanjuk, in 2012, and former Auschwitz SS guard, Oskar Gröning, last year.

Both were convicted on the basis that their presence at the death camps meant they were complicit in mass murder.

The two cases marked a change in the attitude of German prosecutors to Holocaust perpetrators. Until 2012, German judges had demanded specific eyewitness evidence directly implicating the accused which, in most cases, proved impossible to find.

Additional reporting by agencies