'Auschwitz camp guard': Germany investigates ex-SS man

German prosecutors are examining the case of an 87-year-old Nazi suspect accused of involvement in mass murder at the Auschwitz death camp.

The former SS man is not German, nor is he living in Germany.

He was allegedly a camp guard in 1944, when about 344,000 Jews from Hungary were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers in occupied Poland.

Prosecutors in Weiden, Bavaria, are to decide whether to charge him and try to bring him to Germany to face trial.

The man is believed to have lived in the Weiden area before going abroad after World War II.

German officials have not named him, but the Sueddeutsche Zeitung news website says the suspect is believed to be a Slovak now living in Philadelphia, in the US.

The chief prosecutor at Germany's office investigating Nazi war crimes, Kurt Schrimm, said details on the suspect came to light during the high-profile Demjanjuk investigation.

In March this year Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, found guilty for his role as a Nazi guard at the Sobibor death camp, died aged 91. He had been sentenced to five years in prison by a German court in May 2011.

Auschwitz was the biggest Nazi death camp where more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered.