BERLIN — In a series of home raids, Germany has arrested three men — aged 88, 92 and 94 — suspected of being former SS guards at the Auschwitz death camp.

The three elderly men underwent medical tests and then faced a judge who confirmed their fitness to be detained in a prison hospital, prosecutors said in a statement Thursday.

The men were suspected of having served as Auschwitz SS guards from 1942 to 1944 and of having participated in murders at the Nazis’ extermination camp in occupied Poland, where more than 1 million people were killed in the Second World War.

The three men lived in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg, said prosecutors in the city of Stuttgart.

The oldest of the group is thought to be Hans Koenig,the Daily Mirror reported, who was known as a “bruiser” in Auschwitz – a guard said to have engaged in cruelty for its own sake.

Last year he told a German paper he was “happy to be part of it”.

Home raids were carried out at three more locations in the state, as well as at other homes in the western states of Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia, and further arrests were pending.

“Various records and documents from the Nazi era were seized and their evaluation is ongoing,” said the statement about the six Baden-Württemberg home raids.

Frankfurt prosecutors separately confirmed two raids in Hess state Wednesday, in which police searched the homes of men aged 89 and 92 but reported no immediate arrests.

In Hess, the police searched the apartment of an 89-year-old and a 92-year-old in North Rhein- Westphalia. The police secured written documentation and photographs about the men’s alleged work as guards at Auschwitz.

In North Rhein-Westphalia, the police searched the apartment of a 92-year-old man who confessed to having worked as a member of the SS at Auschwitz.

The raids come after the German office investigating Nazi war crimes last year sent files on 30 former Auschwitz personnel, including many women, to state prosecutors with a recommendation to bring charges against them.

Three female suspects are expected to be charged later this year, sources said.

Witnesses claim Gertrud Elli Schmid, 92, was a “merciless” officer who whipped inmates. Her daughter said her mother’s memory is failing but admitted: “We know she had something to do with Auschwitz.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff praised the arrests.

“It is important to remember in these cases that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers and old age should not protect those who helped run the largest death camp in human history,” Zuroff told the Jerusalem Post.

The renewed drive to bring to justice the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust follows a 2011 landmark court ruling.

For more than 60 years German courts had only prosecuted Nazi war criminals when evidence showed they had personally committed atrocities.

But in 2011 a Munich court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for complicity in the extermination of Jews at the Sobibor camp, where he had served as a guard, establishing that all former camp guards can be tried.

More than 1 million people, mostly European Jews, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, operated by the Nazis from 1940 until it was liberated by Russian forces on 27 January, 1945.

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