German prosecutors have charged a 93-year-old alleged former guard at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz with complicity to murder.
The accused, who was not identified by prosecutors but has been named by media as Hans Lipschis, was deported to Germany from the US in the 1980s for failing to reveal his SS past.
He was arrested in Germany in May.
The public prosecutor's office in the southwestern city of Stuttgart said the charge related to his duties in the camp between 1941 and 1943.
Through his function there, he is alleged "to have supported the operation of the camp and thereby the extermination activities", it said in a statement.
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Lipschis has not responded to the charge but in the past he has reportedly said he only worked as a cook at Auschwitz.
For more than 60 years German courts only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence showed they had personally committed atrocities, but since a 2011 landmark case all former camp guards can be tried.
After the war ended, Lipschis initially lived in northern Germany until emigrating to the US in 1956, the prosecutor's statement said.
He was deported in 1982 after it emerged he had failed to disclose his SS membership as part of the personnel at Auschwitz.
He has since lived in the district of Ostalb, in southwestern Baden Wuerttemberg state, and a court in Ellwangen must now decide whether to go to trial.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, in its 2013 report, lists Lipschis as its fourth most-wanted Nazi.
More than one million people, mostly European Jews, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1940 until it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
