Germany arrests three suspected Auschwitz guards

The homes of a number of men were raided in three German states, months after prosecutors investigating Nazi-era war crimes announced they were recommending charges against 30 people. The three men taken into custody have been sent to a prison hospital. More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz. The three men detained all live in the south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg and are suspected of involvement in murders that took place between 1942-45. They were taken to Hohenasperg prison hospital in Ludwigsburg, reports say. Raids also took place in the states of Hessen and North Rhine-Westphalia, although none of the suspects was arrested, Kazinform cites BBC News. The decision to take action against alleged Nazi guards followed the conviction in May 2011 of John Demjanjuk. A court decided that by being a worker at a concentration camp he was guilty of being an accessory to murder. This meant that courts did not have to prove active participation in killing to find a suspect guilty of murder, BBC Berlin correspondent Stephen Evans reports. Demjanjuk, who died in 2012 aged 91, had denied being a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He had been sentenced to five years in jail for being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 people but died in a home for the elderly while the case was pending appeal.