STUTTGART (Reuters) - German police on Monday arrested a suspected former guard at the Auschwitz death camp and Nazi-hunting group Simon Wiesenthal named him as Hans Lipschis. Prosecutors in the southwestern city of Stuttgart did not name the man but said police had arrested a 93-year-old alleged former Auschwitz guard with the "strong suspicion" he was involved in murder there. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said it welcomed the arrest of Lipschis - fourth on its list of most wanted Nazi criminals.

German authorities arrested Monday a 93-year-old alleged former guard at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz on charges of complicity in the mass murder of prisoners. Prosecutors in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said the man was believed to have worked at the camp between autumn 1941 and its closure in 1945. Authorities declined to release the suspect's name but media reports and the Simon Wiesenthal Center said it was Hans Lipschis, who figures among the Center's most-wanted Nazis and is said to have served in the SS "Death's Head" battalion.

The late German actor who starred in the wildly popular television crime show "Derrick" was a member of Hitler's notorious Waffen SS, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported Friday. Horst Tappert, who played the beloved baggy-eyed detective from 1974 to 1998 in a programme that ran in more than 100 countries, was a member of an SS tank regiment on the Russian front, according to the report. According to archives listing next-of-kin for Wehrmacht soldiers, Tappert joined the Waffen SS at the latest in 1943, the newspaper said. Tappert died in 2008.

Austria's far-right Freedom Party has fired the spokesman for its Vienna branch for reportedly posting quotes from wartime Nazi marching songs on Facebook. "We are looking closely into the matter, but independent of that the Vienna FPOe and Stefan Gotschacher have gone their separate ways with immediate effect," the party said on Wednesday. According to the Falter weekly, Gotschacher posted on the social networking website lines from the Nazi era song "SS marschiert im Feindesland" ("SS marches in enemy land").