German police have arrested a former Auschwitz guard who they claim is responsible for murders committed during the Holocaust.
The prosecutor's statement did not reveal any name for the subject, as German law does not permit publicity of such information, but it did say that the man was taken into custody on grounds of being an accessory to murder.
The suspect worked as a guard at the Polish death camp from 1941 until its liberation in 1945.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a museums that focuses on American racism and the history of the Holocaust, have dubbed the 93-year-old suspect, "Hans Lipschis."
"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)," Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told Reuters in an e-mail statement.
The statement also said that authorities in the southwestern city of Stuttgart searched the suspect's apartment. They did not report findings, but did mention that the suspect was then brought to a judge and put into investigative custody while they prepared an arraignment.
Lipschis is number four on Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi criminals. The proescutor's office began an investigation against the suspect in November of last year.
In 2011, Munich's Sobibor death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk was the first guard arrested for his alleged participation in killing an estimated 28,000 Jews.
The Nazis killed around 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, at Auschwitz, just outside the Polish village of Oswiecim, during World War II.
