A former SS guard was on Friday, June 17 convicted by a German court for complicity in the mass murders at Auschwitz death camp, capping what is likely one of the last Holocaust trials, AFP reports.

More than 70 years after World War II, Reinhold Hanning, 94, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment over his role at the Nazi-run camp in occupied Poland.

"This trial is the very least that society can do to give... at least a semblance of justice, even 70 years after and even with a 94-year-old defendant," chief judge Anke Grudda said.

"The entire complex Auschwitz was like a factory designed to kill people at an industrial level... You were one of those cogs" in the Nazi killing machine, she told the accused on convicting him as an accessory to murder in 170,000 cases.

During the four-month trial, which involved witnesses giving harrowing accounts of the living hell they faced, prosecutors outlined how Hanning had watched over the selection of prisoners deemed fit for slave labor, and those sent to the gas chambers, AFP says.

They also accused him of knowing about the regular mass shootings and the systematic starvation of prisoners.

For Holocaust survivors and inmates' descendants, the trial marked "a big, even though a late, step towards a just examination of the mass murders in Auschwitz".

This is because it for the first time focused on "the division of labour in the collective mass murders at Auschwitz," the plaintiffs said in a joint statement.

Unlike previous trials of officers who personally sent people to the gas chambers, this case covered the broader organization of the extermination camp, where inmates were also starved to death or killed in summary executions.