A 93-year-old former S.S.man has been judged fit to stand trial for his involvement in 170,000 murders at the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz.

The man, identified only as Reinhold H, will be tried at Detmold State Court in Germany next year if his defence appeal fails. 

Prosecutors say they have proof he served at Birkenau - where the gas chambers were located at Auschwitz - between January 1942 and June 1944.

A doctor determined on Monday he was fit to stand trial so long as sessions were limited to two hours a day.

His lawyer argues that he was assigned to the Auschwitz 1 camp in the centre of the Polish town of the same name - a terrible and brutal prison where people were murdered, but nowhere near on the scale of the Birkenau slaughterhouse.

His forthcoming trial is the culmination of a crackdown on Nazi war criminals by a new breed of prosecutor in recent years, determined to atone for the Nazi past.

Their biggest success was the guilty verdict against John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp, who was found guilty and sentenced to five years in 2011. He died the following year while his appeal was pending.

And earlier this year former Auschwitz death camp officer Oskar Groening was sentenced to four years in jail for his part in the deaths of 300,000 Hungarian Jews.

Some 30 Auschwitz guards, including three women, were tracked down in recent years but charges against most of them have been dropped because of age, infirmity and lack of evidence.

One of those judged to be mentally unfit to stand trial was Hans Lipschis, 94, who was said to have herded men, women and children into the gas chambers Auschwitz in Nazi occpupied southern Poland.

Another off the hook is Gisela S., a 90-year-old widow who now lives in an OAP home in northernGermany. The Federal Archive in Berlin threw up her S.S. identity card.

It shows a cold, hard-faced woman who worked in the feared S.S. under her maiden name of Demming when she volunteered for service in 1940.

At Auschwitz she was a harsh disciplinarian who beat prisoners and who was often in charge of the standing cells - small, dark rooms where up to 15 people at a time were crammedin for minor rule infractions. It was not uncommon to leave people in these rooms for days on end, causing the death of some or all of those confined.

It was judged that she was mentally incompetent to face justice.

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