Prosecutors in Germany have charged a seventy-nine-year-old man with involvement in the killing of seventeen-thousand people, mostly Jews, in concentration camps during the Second World War.

The man is a former member of the Gestapo secret police and has admitted he personally shot five-hundred people.

But he has said he is not a major war criminal and was only carrying out orders.

The man, an ethnic German from Ukraine, was held in a prisoner of war camp in Siberia for thirteen years after the end of the war, and only returned to Germany in 1991.