The world's third most-wanted Nazi suspect has died before he could be brought to trial, a German court said Monday.
Samuel Kunz, 89, died Nov. 18, Bonn's state court said in a statement.
Kunz, a retired civil servant who was living near Bonn, was indicted on charges he was involved in the entire process of killing Jews at the Belzec death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
He was said to have taken victims from trains, pushed them into gas chambers and thrown corpses into mass graves. No trial date had been set.
Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's top Nazi hunter, said it was "incredibly frustrating" that Kunz died before trial.
But he said it was important that he was indicted.
"At least a small measure of justice was achieved," Zuroff said.
Officials said Kunz was accused of taking part in the killing of 430,000 Jews and he was also charged with personally shooting 10 dead at Belzec, BBC News reported in July.
He was 20 when he started working as a camp guard and charges were brought in a juvenile chamber of the Bonn court, the BBC reported. People aged between 18 and 21 can either be dealt with by the courts as adults or children in Germany.
'Very few survived'
, after Kunz was indicted, Zuroff said special credit should be given to the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, because its investigations into John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born U.S. citizen currently on trial for war crimes, had "yielded crucial information" about Kunz.
"We’re pleased that Kunz was indicted and that it's possible to bring Nazi perpetrators to justice years after their crimes were committed," Zuroff said in the July statement.
"This case is important, because it will shed light on Belzec, though little known, was where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered and very few survived," he added.
"The indictment reflects recent changes in the German prosecution policy, which has significantly increased the number of suspects brought to justice, changes that the Wiesenthal Center has long pushed for," Zuroff added.
