The trial of a 99-year-old suspected former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin during the Nazi era has been abandoned on the grounds of his age, the court sitting in Hanau near Frankfurt announced on Wednesday.
The man is not fit to stand trial on health grounds, according to a decision by the court, a youth court on account of the man's age at the time of the offences.
Prosecutors in the city of Giessen brought the charges against the man last year. He was accused of working at the camp and of supporting "the cruel and insidious killing of thousands of prisoners" in the period July 1943 to February 1945 in a total of 3,300 cases.
The case was transferred to Hanau as the man's place of residence.
As member of an SS guard battalion, the man is alleged to have guarded the prisoners, and to have assisted in guarding arriving prisoners from the railway station to the main camp.
During the period in question, at least 3,318 prisoners are believed to have died as a result of being shot or poisoned with gas, or as a result of conditions at the camp.
A psychiatric report from October last year said the man had limited capacity to stand trial. A further report in February concluded that his physical and psychological state had deteriorated. On these grounds, the court took the decision to abort the trial.
Around 204,000 people were interned by the Nazis in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, about 35 kilometres north of Berlin from 1936 onwards. Tens of thousands died from being starved or worked to death, or being gassed by Hitler's elite military forces, the SS.
Thousands more prisoners died on "death marches," when they were evacuated from the camp at the end of April 1945.