A new attempt in Germany to prosecute surviving former Nazis who served as guards at Auschwitz is set to fail, according to a special report in Spiegel magazine.
At least 1.1 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps, alongside tens of thousands of gypsies, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The bones of those killed in the gas chambers were sold as fertiliser, their ashes were used to build roads, and the women's hair was spun into yarn.
But of the 6,500 former SS men who served as camp guards at Auschwitz and survived the war, only 49 have ever been convicted in German courts.
In February this year prosecutors announced they were considering new cases against 30 former SS guards at Auschwitz, including some who were serving there in 1944 when the transport carrying the 15-year-old Anne Frank arrived.
But most of those cases have since fallen through: some of the suspects have died since February, others have been found too sick to stand trial, and one was found to have been already punished by a Polish court.
Prosecutors are now only considering cases against eight former guards, and only two are thought likely to come to trial.
It is the latest twist in the long saga of Germany's failure to bring those who served at Auschwitz to justice.
The notorious camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, was sentenced to death by a Polish court and hanged in 1947.
Auschwitz lies in modern Poland, and in the years after the war 700 former SS guards at the camp were tried and convicted in the Polish courts.
But only 49 have ever been convicted by German courts - 20 of them in the former East Germany.
In the 1960s, 17 former guards and others who worked at Auschwitz were convicted in a series of high-profile trials in West Germany.
But in 1976 a former SS sergeant was acquitted of driving 400 Hungarian children alive into a fire because the only witness could not be questioned.
And in 1982 a former SS guard who was stationed to prevent Jews fleeing as they arrived was acquitted on the grounds they didn't know what awaited them, so didn't try to escape.
(The Telegraph)
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