The Duisburg district court said in a statement on Tuesday that the man was being charged with murder in 58 cases. The man allegedly was a member of the paramilitary Fifth SS Tank Division "Viking." Together with other members of his unit, he planned and carried out the executions of at least 57 Jewish forced laborers on March 29, 1945 in Deutsch Schuetzen, a municipality in eastern Austria.

"The laborers were brought to a nearby wood, where they were told to hand over their valuables and then kneel down in a ditch," said court spokesman Ulrich Hermanski in a statement. "The defendant and further SS soldiers then shot the laborers from behind."

Members of the Hitler Youth organization were also believed to have been involved in the massacre.

The defendant is furthermore accused of shooting from behind "in a cowardly manner" a Jewish forced laborer on the same or next day, Hermanski said. The man was exhausted and couldn't walk anymore on a march with more than 100 forced laborers near Jabing in Austria.

Led by Nazi ideology

Media reports have identified the defendant as Adolf Storms. But prosecutors have not named the man, who lives in the western German city of Duisburg.

"The prosecution assumes that the defendant was led by an extremely hostile and inhuman attitude towards the victims, whom he considered inferior, in accordance with National Socialist ideology," Hermanski said.

The Duisburg court will now have to decide whether to put the elderly man on trial. He has two weeks to present evidence or appeal against the case proceeding.

Listed in the telephone book

The news magazine Der Spiegel reported last October that investigators had their attention drawn to the man thanks to research into the massacre by 28-year-old Austrian student Andreas Forster. He located the 90-year-old by simply looking up his name in a German telephone directory.

Forster travelled to Duisburg and filmed hours of interviews over several days, finding the elderly man to be "sprightly" but unable to recollect the day of the massacre.

"We informed prosecutors in July," Forster told the magazine. In December, police raided the man's residence and seized documents.

Meanwhile, the trial of suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk is due to start on November 30 in Munich. The 89-year-old Demjanjuk has been charged with helping to kill 27,900 Jews while a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, deported from the United States in May, is number three on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted war criminals, behind two others believed to be dead.

sac/AFP/dpa/Reuters
Editor: Susan Houlton