BERLIN - The world's third most wanted Nazi suspect has been charged in Germany with participation in the murder of 430,000 Jews at the Belzec death camp and other crimes during the Third Reich, officials said Wednesday.

Samuel Kunz, 88, had been living undisturbed for decades at his home near the western city of Bonn when he received a letter last week saying he had been charged with three different cases of participating in the murder of Jews, prosecutor Christoph Goeke in Dortmund said.

Kunz, who is the No. 3 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazi suspects, had long been ignored by the German justice system, partly due to a lack of past interest in going after relatively low-ranking camp guards.

But in the past 10 years a younger generation of German prosecutors has emerged interested in bringing all surviving Nazi suspects to justice.

The Wiesenthal Center's most wanted Nazi is Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian gendarmerie officer accused of involvement in the deaths of 1,200 civilians in Serbia, while second on the list is Milivoj Asner, who served as police chief in Croatia during the war. He now lives in Austria, which has refused to extradite him to Croatia on medical grounds.

While Kunz ranked fairly low in the Nazi hierarchy, he is among the top most wanted due to the large number of Jews he is accused of having been involved in killing - which the prosecutor's office in Dortmund puts at 430,000.

The highest-profile example of guards facing trial is the ongoing case against John Demjanjuk, the 90-year-old retired autoworker being tried in Munich for accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. He denies he was ever a camp guard.

Ironically, Kunz's case came to light because of Demjanjuk.

Authorities recently stumbled over Kunz's case when they studied old documents from German post-wars trials about the SS training camp Trawniki in connection with the trial of John Demjanjuk, said Klaus Hillenbrand, an expert who has written several books on the Nazi period.

Kunz has been indicted on charges including participation in the murder of 430,000 Jews at the Belzec death camp in occupied Poland, where he allegedly served as a guard from January 1942 to July 1943, as well as murder over "personal excesses" in which he allegedly shot a total of 10 Jews in two other incidents, Goeke told The Associated Press.

Prosecutors allege both Kunz and the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who was deported to Germany from the U.S. last year, trained as guards at the Trawniki SS camp.

In the 1960s, Kunz gave testimony as a witness about his time there in a different trial, but he was never indicted himself.

"During the 1960s, prosecutors were not interested in charging low-ranking guards," Hillenbrand said.

"That changed in the last 10 years, when a new generation of prosecutors took over and there's a new way of thinking among them - the law itself was not changed, just the interpretation of the law."

Reached by phone at his home, Kunz said he did not want to talk about the allegations against him and hung up.

Despite the charges against him, Kunz currently still lives at home and was not detained because officials who interviewed him think that he will not try to flee the country, a person familiar with the case said. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to reveal details of the investigation.

Goeke said the case has been sent to the state court in Bonn, where officials were considering whether and when to hold a trial - a standard procedural step in Germany.

Bonn court spokesman Matthias Nordmeyer said the court did not want to comment now on the case.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Kunz participated in the so-called Operation Reinhard to eliminate Polish Jewry.

"The indictment of Samuel Kunz is a very positive development," Zuroff told the AP from Jerusalem. "It reflects recent changes in the German prosecution policy, which have significantly enlarged the number of suspects who will be brought to justice."

Zuroff said Kunz had never previously been on trial over his alleged Nazi-era past and confirmed his name recently came up in investigations connected to the trial of Demjanjuk.

Kunz, an ethnic German, was born in August 1921 on Russia's Volga River.

As a soldier with the Soviet Red Army during World War II, he was captured by the Germans and given the choice of either staying at the Chelm prisoner of war camp or cooperating with the Nazis, said Hillenbrand.

Kunz agreed to work with the Nazis and, after he was trained at Trawniki, was transferred to Belzec where he served as a camp guard, Hillenbrand said.

After the war, he moved to Bonn, worked for many years at a federal ministry and was granted German citizenship.

After several German media outlets recently reported about Kunz's alleged Nazi past in connection with the Demjanjuk trial, the Dortmund prosecutor's office started an investigation into the allegations, Hillenbrand said.

Despite a recent push by prosecutors to track down Nazi suspects, their efforts often come too late.

According to media reports, former Nazi SS officer Erich Steidtmann, who had been suspected but never convicted of involvement in World War II massacres, died on Sunday.

Steidtmann was a captain in the Nazi's elite SS force who led several battalions which allegedly carried out the mass murder of Jews, and he was long sought by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

He was investigated several times for his alleged involvement in killings at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and two massacres in the Polish city of Lublin.

Adolf Storms, a 90-year-old former SS sergeant who was No. 4 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazi war crimes suspects, died earlier this month before he could be brought to trial.

Prosecutors were investigating Storms in connection with 58 counts of murder for his alleged involvement in a massacre of Jewish forced laborers in a forest near the Austrian village of Deutsch Schuetzen.