Alleged Nazi Concentration Camp Killer Dies At 86

Wallisch always said she had only guarded prisoners.

A woman alleged to have murdered prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two has died aged 86, Austrian justice officials said on Thursday.

German-born Erna Wallisch died in hospital on Saturday a month after Austria, prompted by new testimony from Poland, reopened an investigation into her past that had been dropped in 1973 for lack of hard evidence.

The Polish findings, based on witness statements, suggested Wallisch may have committed murder in the Majdanek camp near Lublin in Nazi-occupied Poland, Vienna state prosecutors said last month.

Wallisch always said she had only guarded prisoners.

"We have now ceased the investigation on account of her death," prosecutors' office spokesman Gerhard Jarosch said.

Wallisch was a camp warden in Nazi Germany's Ravensbrueck concentration camp, north of Berlin, and at Majdanek in 1942-1944, and settled in Austria soon after the end of the war.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, expressed regret on Thursday that Wallisch could not be prosecuted before she died.

"(She) and her family can thank the decades-old failure of successive Austrian governments for the fact she was ultimately never punished for ... taking people to be gassed and guarding them so they could not escape," Zuroff said in a statement.

"Her death should serve as a reminder to all the governments dealing with cases of Nazi war criminals that they had best expedite these prosecutions while justice can still be achieved."

Jewish groups have accused Austria, which was annexed by Hitler in 1938 and supplied his Third Reich with many top officials, of a lack of political will to punish Nazi criminals.

Austria has cited problems unearthing evidence compounded by the passage of time. More than 60 years after World War Two, few prominent Nazis are believed to be still alive.