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Elderly guards from the infamous Auschwitz death camp could be prosecuted in a move expected to see hundreds of Nazis face trial.

German justice officials say 30 surviving staff from the infamous World War II concentration camp should be brought to justice for their role in the Holocaust.

It marks the beginning of a hunt for low-level perpetrators of Hitler’s killing machine starting at the camp where 1.5million people were slaughtered.

State justice minister Rainer Stickelberger said: “Even though pursing Nazi crimes becomes more difficult with every year that goes by, we have a huge responsibility because of our history.

“We cannot let the terrible memory of the crimes of Nazism fade away.”

More than 7,000 SS guards served at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland between 1940-45 but only a few hundred faced prosecution.

The Nazis murdered most of their victims - mostly Jews but also gypsies, Poles and other persecuted groups - in gas chambers.

Many others were shot, starved to death or killed in medical experiments.

Of the 40 surviving Auschwitz guards 30 live in Germany and are aged between 87 and 97.

Chief prosecutor Kurt Schirm said: “The accused are all former guards at the concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and we take the view that this job - regardless of what they can be individually accused of - makes them guilty of complicity in murder.”

(Image: Getty)

After years of concentrating on those who managed the mass murder focus has now shifted since the case of John Demjanjuk.

The Ukraine-born guard was given a five-year jail sentence for complicity in the murder of more than 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor camp in Poland.

The retired mechanic was the first Nazi to be convicted in Germany without evidence of a specific crime or victim but purely on the grounds he had served as a guard.

He died in a Bavarian nursing home while appealing his sentence last year, aged 91.

The justice agency responsible for bringing Nazi war criminals to justice is now recommending prosecution of former staff at death camps and members of special killing squads.

But not even cleaners and junior kitchen staff at concentration camps should be spared according to prosecutors.

They argue they played a vital role at venues set up for mass murder.

Due to their advanced years campaigners are demanding the 30 Auschwitz guards are quickly brought to trial.

Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said: “The passage of time in no way diminishes their guilt.

“And every prosecution is an important reminder that justice can still be obtained.”

The justice agency will now hand over its findings to prosecutors in the 11 German states where they live to decide whether to bring charges.

The next six months will see files re-examined on Nazis who served at Majdanek death camp in eastern Poland.

It comes after a 92-year-old former SS killer went on trial yesterday charged with shooting in the back and killing a Dutch resistance fighter in 1945.