Nazi trial starts in Paris

The trial has opened in France of a convicted war criminal who may well be dead.

The defendant is Alois Brunner, a member of the Nazi SS who sent tens of thousands of French Jews to extermination camps during the Second World War.

The trial today focuses on the deportation of hundreds of Jewish children.

No prisoner is standing before the court: Brunner fled to Syria in the 1950s and is assumed to have died since then.

A BBC correspondent in Paris says the trial is nevertheless a powerful symbolic act, passing judgement on one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust in France.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service