A German court ruled on Friday that a 94-year-old man, a former resident of Chicago, was unfit to stand trial on charges of being an accessory to murder during his time as an alleged former guard at Nazi Germany's Auschwitz death camp.

Judges at Ellwangen court in southwest Germany said the accused, named by the Simon Wiesenthal Nazi-hunting group as Hans Lipschis, suffered from worsening dementia and would be unable to follow what would have amounted to a long trial.

Lipschis was arrested in May last year as part of a renewed campaign to bring lower-level Nazi collaborators to justice before they die. He was number four on the Simon Wiesenthal Center list of most wanted Nazi criminals and was charged with being an accessory to 10,510 counts of murder.

"The court has refused to open the trial. The chamber is of the opinion that the 94-year-old is incapable of standing trial. It bases this judgment on its own personal impression and the opinion of a psychiatrist," a court statement said.

Prosecutors said the accused had worked as a guard at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1941 to 1943, a period in which 12 prisoner convoys arrived at the extermination camp. More than 10,000 of those prisoners were determined unfit for work and sent to the gas chamber immediately upon arrival.

Lipschis was deported from the United States in 1983 after the Justice Department accused him of concealing his Nazi past when he immigrated to the U.S. around 1956.

Prosecutors alleged that the Lithuanian-born man had been a member of the Waffen SS, a Nazi unit whose duties included "systematically exploiting and murdering people because of their race … and other characteristics." Lipschis had been assigned to camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, in Poland, according to the complaint.

Lipschis agreed to accept deportation rather than go on trial before an immigration judge. Then a resident of Chicago's Ashburn neighborhood, he flew to Munich on April 14, 1983. At the time, he was the first person in 34 years to be deported from the U.S. as the result of a war crimes investigation.

Lipschis was able to avoid prosecution in Germany for the next three decades because prosecutors could not link him to a specific crime against a specific victim, said Efraim Zuroff, of the Wiesenthal Center.

But the recent conviction of death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk provided the legal basis for prosecution of Nazi war criminals without evidence of a specific crime and victim, Zuroff said. A Munich court convicted Demjanjuk in 2011 of playing a part in the killing of 28,000 Jews at a Nazi camp in German-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk died in March of last year while an appeal of his conviction was pending.

Zuroff said Lipschis' name was widely publicized in Germany after officials announced that they were investigating former Auschwitz guards.

Lipschis told the German newspaper Die Welt last year that he had been a cook at Auschwitz and had later left the camp to fight on the Eastern Front, although he could not remember which unit he had been in.

Some 1.5 million people perished at Auschwitz, mostly Jews but also Roma, Poles and others, between 1940 and 1945.

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