German prosecutors charged a 90-year-old former SS soldier earlier this week with 58 counts of murder for the killing of Jewish forced labourers in the final weeks of World War II.

With Allied forces fast overrunning Germany, the man, named in media reports as Adolf Storms, was accused of hatching a plot on March 28, 1945 with other SS and members of the Hitler Youth, to slaughter Jewish prisoners.

The next day, the accused and other SS took at least 57 labourers in several groups into woods near the small town of Deutsch Schuetzen in Hitler's native Austria near the present-day border with Hungary, prosecutors alleged.

There the Jews, who were Hungarians, were stripped of their valuables before being made to kneel down in a ditch. Storms and his accomplices then dispatched them with bullets from behind, prosecutors said in a statement.

The same day or the day after, he gunned down a 58th labourer in nearby Jabing who was too exhausted to continue a forced march of around 100 others, shot in the same "cowardly" manner in the back, prosecutors said.

The 90-year-old, a former member of the fifth SS Tank Division "Viking", now lives in the west German industrial city of Duisburg near Cologne. In December, police raided his residence, seizing documents.

Spiegel magazine reported last October that investigators were put onto Storms thanks to research into the massacre by a 28-year-old Austrian student, Andreas Forster.

Mr Forster travelled to Duisburg and filmed hours of interviews over several days, finding the elderly man to be "sprightly" but unable to recollect the day of the massacre.