2/14/2016, 6:36 AM israelnationalnews.com
Suspected Auschwitz guard dies in Croatia
By Ben Ariel

Jakob Denzinger, who was under investigation for his Nazi past, dies at 92 before being prosecuted.

Jakob Denzinger, a Croatian man suspected of having been a guard at Auschwitz, has died at the age of 92, local media reported Saturday, according to AFP.

Denzinger, who had been living in the eastern city of Osijek, reportedly died in hospital on Thursday.

In 2014, Croatian prosecutors said they had placed him under investigation after his name reportedly figured on a list of people compiled by special German prosecutors in charge of investigating Nazi war crimes.

The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center had at the time urged Croatian authorities to move quickly, saying that "people who served as guards in the largest mass murder factory in human history" did "not deserve any sympathy due to age or to frailty".

Denzinger was born in Osijek, where he served in Hitler's Waffen-SS, noted AFP.

He moved to the United States after the war and worked in business until 1989, when judicial proceedings were launched to strip him of his American citizenship due to his Nazi past.

Denzinger then returned to his homeland.

In recent years, Germany has attempted to bring surviving Holocaust perpetrators to justice while there is still time.

The crackdown on Nazi war criminals began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp and sentenced to five years.

This past week, former Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning went on trial for complicity in the murders of tens of thousands of people at the Nazi concentration camp.

The 94-year-old Hanning is charged with at least 170,000 counts of being an accessory to murder in his role at the camp in occupied Poland.

israelnationalnews.com