Germany arrests three suspected Auschwitz guards in renewed Nazi criminals hunt

German police raided the homes of nine elderly men suspected of serving as SS guards at the Auschwitz death camp and arrested three of them on allegations of being accessories to murder.

The arrests came five months after federal authorities said they would investigate former guards at Auschwitz and other Nazi-era death camps.

Their effort was inspired by the precedent-setting trial of John Demjanjuk, who died in 2012 in a Bavarian nursing home while appealing against his conviction on charges that he served at the Sobibor camp.

"This is a major step," said Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem.

"Given the advanced age of the defendants, every effort should be made to expedite their prosecution."

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was the first person convicted in Germany solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in any specific killing.