A 94-year-old ex-Waffen SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp is due to go on trial in Germany over the murder of at least 170,000 people during the Second World War.

Reinhold Hanning is alleged to have met mostly Jewish prisoners as they arrived at the camp in occupied Poland. Prosecutors say he may have even escorted some of the doomed inmates to the gas chambers.

Hanning has admitted being a guard whilst he served as an SS Unterscharfuehrer - similar to a sergeant - in Auschwitz from January 1943 to June 1944.

During that period hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were transported to the Nazi camp and gassed.

He dies involvement in mass murder.

Prosecutor Andreas Brendel said that guards in the main camp were also used as on-call guards to support those in the adjacent Birkenau camp when trainloads of Jews were taken in.

"We believe that these auxiliaries were used in particular during the so-called Hungarian action in support of Birkenau," he said.

At least three Auschwitz survivors are expected to join the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law, and are scheduled to testify about their experiences during the first two days of the proceedings.

Hanning's case is one of 30 involving former Auschwitz guards investigated by federal prosecutors from Germany's special Nazi war crimes office in Ludwigsburg.

Over one million people - most of them Jews - were killed at Auschwitz, one of the most infamous death camps in the Nazi's evil extermination programme.