BONN, Germany, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- An accused Nazi death camp guard has died before he could be tried for aiding in the murder of 430,000 Jews, German authorities said.
Samuel Kunz, 89, died Thursday, The Guardian reported.
Kunz's role at Belzec in occupied Poland included herding victims from trains, leading them into gas chambers and throwing corpses into mass graves, an indictment said.
Kunz, a retired civil servant, was charged as a minor because he was under 21 when the extermination program began.
An ethnic German from Russia, he was a Red Army soldier captured by the Germans. He was trained at the SS camp at Trawniki and posted to Belzec, where 430,000 Jews were gassed between January 1942 and July 1943.
After the war, Kunz became a German citizen. He always refused to comment on the charges.
Kunz came under scrutiny as a planned witness at the trial of accused camp guard John Demjanjuk, who also trained at Trawniki.
Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told the Jewish Chronicle of London it as "incredibly frustrating" to lose the chance to try Kunz and urged Germany to expedite Nazi cases "so that a measure of justice can still be achieved."
