A German court today jailed an 89-year-old former SS guard for life for the murder of an inmate and shooting another during the Second World War.
In what could be Germany's last trial for Nazi war crimes, Anton Malloth, a guard at the Theresienstadt fortress in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, was convicted of beating and kicking to death a Jewish inmate in 1944.
The Munich court also convicted him of the attempted murder of a prisoner who was shot for hiding a cauliflower under his jacket during forced farm work.
Prosecutors sought a life sentence, saying justice needed to be done out of respect for the victims and as a warning to Germany's increasingly violent neo-Nazis.
Since the war, German prosecutors twice dropped investigations against Malloth - most recently in 1999 - for lack of evidence.
Munich prosecutors reopened the case later that year after a Czech witness stepped forward and told investigators that Malloth beat and shot the inmate in the vegetable patch.
Malloth was convicted and sentenced to death in absentia by a Czechoslovak court in 1948 for alleged hundreds of killings.
AP