BERLIN
— A 90-year-old former SS sergeant who was No. 4 on the Simon
Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazi war crimes suspects
has died before he could be brought to trial, German authorities
said Tuesday.
Adolf Storms died at his home in the western city of Duisburg on June 28, Dortmund
prosecutor Andreas Brendel said. He said he did not know
the exact cause of death.
Brendel's office charged Storms in
November with 58 counts of murder for his alleged involvement
in a massacre of Jewish forced laborers in a forest near
the Austrian village of Deutsch Schuetzen.
Storms and other unidentified accomplices
were accused of forcing at least 57 of the Jewish laborers
to hand over their valuables and kneel by a grave before
fatally shooting them from behind.
A day after the March 29, 1945 massacre,
Storms was alleged to have shot another Jew who could no
longer walk during a forced march in Austria from Deutsch
Schuetzen to the village of Hartberg.
Several former members of the Hitler
Youth who were helping the SS guard the prisoners on the
march provided witness statements, and Brendel said he thought
he had strong evidence against Storms.
"I would have liked to
have tried the case," he said.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter
at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Storms' death before
a trial could begin was a "classic example" of the challenges his office and prosecutors face today in continuing to pursue
suspects more than six decades after the end of World War
II.
"At least he was under
investigation and faced indictment," Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
Storms worked unnoticed for decades
as a train station manager until a University of Vienna student
doing undergraduate research uncovered his alleged involvement
in the wartime massacre.
The student and his professor, Walter
Manoschek, tracked him down and Manoschek then visited Storms
several times. The professor conducted about 12 hours of
interviews in which Storms repeatedly said that he does not
remember the killings.
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