60 years on.. ss veteran charged over 58 murders; 90-year-old 'massacred Jews'.

Byline: ADRIAN SHAW 

A 90-YEAR-old ex-SS sergeant has been charged with murdering 58 Jews in the final months of the Second World War.

Adolf Storms is said to have marched 57 Jewish forced labourers to a forest near the village of Deutsch Schuetzen, Austria.They were forced to kneel by a mass grave and then shot. Storms is also accused of shooting dead another labourer who collapsed during the march.

After the war ended Storms was briefly interned in a US prisoner of war camp. He was then allowed to return to his home town of Duisburg in Germany, where he has lived for the past 60 years. His alleged war crimes only came to light after a student researching the massacre of March 1945 discovered documents that named him The student passed his information on to state prosecutors in Duisburg. A court statement said: "The accused and his accomplices brought at least 57 Jewish forced labourers in several groups to a nearby forest area where they had to give up their valuables and kneel by a grave. The accused and other SS members then cruelly shot them from behind."

Storms, once of the fifth SS Panzer Division, is said to be unable to remember the killings.

Although mentally alert he is in poor physical health. A court will now decide whether there Vienna is enough evidence for a trial.

The Simon Wiesenthal centre, which hunts surviving Nazi war criminals and brings them to justice, said it had not been aware of Storms. Spokesman Efraim Zuroff said: "He wasn't on our radar. He wasn't on anyone's radar. This is a case that clearly shows it is possible, even at this point, to identify perpetrators who bear responsibility for serious crimes and bring them to justice."

CAPTION(S):

GRIM Massacre site WAR CRIME The SS massacred Jews throughout Europe