They are now frail old ladies. But nearly seven decades ago these women were serving as guards at Hitler’s death camps, shepherding hundreds of Nazi Germany’s victims to their deaths.

The women are among some 24 suspects now being investigated by prosecutors in Germany for their wartime roles as accomplices to mass murder.

Despite the fact there are no witnesses left alive to testify as to what they did, prosecutors hope that the mere fact of serving in a place of suffering and death will be enough to bring charges and guilty verdicts.

Last week a former Dachau guard identified only as Horst P, aged 87, was pictured at his Berlin home with a collage of photos of him in his SS uniform beneath the words Mein Kampf – the title of Adolf Hitler’s hate-filled blueprint for racial war.

Now the central authority for the prosecution of Nazi war crimes, based in Ludwigsburg, has sent out files on 24 more suspects, including three women.

Gertrud Elli Schmid, now 92 and living in Hamburg, is one of the suspects. She was formerly an SS guard at Majdanek in the Polish city of Lublin where an estimated 235,000 people were murdered during WW2.

Prosecutors have traced her SS identity card. After service in Majdanek she was sent to Auschwitz, also in occupied Poland, where 1.1million prisoners were exterminated.

Now wheelchair bound, she was tracked down by the daily newspaper Bild. Her daughter said: ‘We know that my mother had something to do with Auschwitz. We have tried to talk with her about it but her memory doesn’t really function any more.’

Tortured: Prisoners look out from behind a barbed wire enclosure at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1945

Another SS woman has been identified as Gisela S. Now 90, she lives in a care home in northern Germany. She too worked at Auschwitz.

Charlotte S, 94, was a guard at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbruck where diarist Anne Frank was briefly incarcerated before being sent to her death at Belsen.

Ravensbruck held mainly women and Charlotte S is said to have been a terrifying figure who beat up  prisoners and unleashed her Alsatian dog on them.

Tried in Communist East Germany after the war, she was locked up for 15 months for attacking prisoners and stealing from them, but this time prosecutors hope to charge her with accessory to murder.

A man on the list is Oskar Groening, cleared of war crimes in 1948. He served in Auschwitz as a clerk sorting through the clothes and possessions of the victims.

Survivors: French prisoners pictured when the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, near Munich, was liberated by Allied troops at the end of April 1945

Prosecution: Children behind a barbed wire fence at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, in southern Poland, where to role of former workers is still the subject of a probe by prosecutors investigating war crimes

He said: 'I was an official in the prisoners' possessions administration which basically involved removing the money, jewels and other valuables from the inmates, registering it and sending it back to Berlin.

'They had diamonds and gold worth millions and it was my duty to make sure all of it got to Berlin.

'It was completely understood by all that the majority were going straight to the gas chamber, although some believed they were only going to be showered before going to work.

Denial: Oskar Groening, now 92, pictured in his SS uniform worn when he served in Auschwitz, said he was not guilty of a crime in an earlier interview with a German newspaper

'Many Jews knew they were going to die. One time a drunken SS man discovered a crying baby on the platform. He grabbed the waif by its legs and smashed its head against the side of a truck. My blood froze when I saw it.'

He claims he applied for a transfer and fought in Belgium until his capture. He, too, now faces an  indictment of complicity to commit mass murder.

On one night in January 1943 he saw for the first time how the Jews were actually gassed.

'It was in a half-built farmyard near to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. A gas chamber was built there. We were searching the wood nearby for prisoners who had escaped,' he went on.

'There were more than 100 prisoners and soon there were panic-filled cries as they were herded into the chamber and the door was shut.

'Then a sergeant with a gasmask went to a hole in the wall and from a tin shook Zyklon B gas pellets inside.

'In that moment the cries of the people inside rose to a crescendo, a choir of madness. These cries I have ringing in my ears to this day.

'I again made an application for a transfer and at the end of October 1944 I was shipped to the Belgian Ardennes where I served with a fighting unit until capture. But you can imagine that down the years I have heard the cries of the dead in my dreams and in every waking moment. I will never be free of them.

'I have never been back there because of my shame. This guilt will never leave me. I can only plead for forgiveness and pray for atonement.'

He, too, is in the eye of prosecutors who believe him to be worthy of an indictment of guilty of complicity to mass murder.

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