Anton Malloth, 90; Convicted SS Guard

Anton Malloth, a former Nazi SS guard who was sentenced last year to life in prison for beating a Jewish concentration camp inmate to death in 1944, has died. He was 90.

Malloth, who was a guard at the Theresienstadt camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, died of cancer at a nursing home in the south German town of Straubing on Oct. 31 -- 10 days after being moved from prison, Cord Lemke, a state justice ministry spokesman said Friday.

It was not immediately clear why the news of his death had been delayed more than a month.

Malloth was sentenced in May 2001 in Munich after one of Germany’s last trials for Nazi-era crimes. He also was convicted of attempted murder in the shooting of another prisoner who hid a cauliflower under his jacket during forced harvest work in 1943.

The investigation against Malloth was closed twice for lack of evidence but was reopened when a Czech witness came forward with new information leading to Malloth’s arrest at a Munich nursing home in 2000.

His murder conviction was based on testimony that, in 1944, he hit a Jewish prisoner over the head with a stick about 20 times, then kicked him in the chest and head until he died.

“He tortured, humiliated and killed people because he considered them subhumans who had no right to live,” Judge Juergen Hanreich said in his verdict.

Germany’s highest criminal court rejected Malloth’s appeal in February.

Born in Austria in 1912, Malloth took Italian citizenship after World War I and became a German in 1939, the year World War II began, so he could join the SS.

Malloth was sentenced to death in absentia by a Czechoslovakian court in 1948 for hundreds of killings at Theresienstadt.

But Malloth had fled to Italy and reclaimed his Italian citizenship. Rome revoked it after finding he had lied about his SS past, and he was deported to Germany in 1988 because he had German papers.

About 20 Nazi war crimes investigations are pending in Germany, where prosecutors in recent years reopened a number of cases against former Nazi officers that had been dropped decades earlier.