A German court has set a trial date for a 100-year-old man who is charged with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin during World War II.

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A spokeswoman for the Neuruppin state court said Monday that the trial is set to begin in early October. The centenarian's name wasn't released in line with German privacy laws.

The suspect is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing.

Authorities say that despite his advanced age, the suspect is considered fit enough to stand trial, though the number of hours per day the court is in session may have to be limited.

"A medical evaluation confirms that he is fit to stand trial in a limited way," court spokeswoman Iris le Claire said.

The Neuruppin office was handed the case in 2019 by the special federal prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes. The state court in Neuruppin is based northwest of the town of Oranienburg, where Sachsenhausen was located.

The defendant is said to live in the state of Brandenburg outside of Berlin, local media reported.

Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 just north of Berlin as the first new camp after Adolf Hitler gave the SS full control of the Nazi concentration camp system. It was intended to be a model facility and training camp for the labyrinthine network that the Nazis built across Germany, Austria and occupied territories.

More than 200,000 people were held there between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands of inmates there died of starvation, disease, forced labor and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations including shootings, hangings and gassing.

Exact numbers on those killed vary, with upper estimates of some 100,000, though scholars suggest figures of 40,000 to 50,000 are likely more accurate.

In its early years, most prisoners were either political prisoners or criminal prisoners, but also included some Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. The first large group of Jewish prisoners was brought there in 1938 after Kirstallnacht.

During the war, Sachsenhausen was expanded to include Soviet prisoners of war – who were shot by the thousands – as well as others.

Like in other camps, Jewish prisoners were singled out at Sachsenhausen for particularly harsh treatment, and most who remained alive by 1942 were sent to the Auschwitz death camp.

Sachsenhausen was liberated in April 1945 by the Soviets, who turned it into a brutal camp of their own.

In a different case, a 96-year-old woman will go on trial in late September in the northern German town of Itzehoe. The woman, who allegedly worked during the war as the secretary for the SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp, has been charged with over 10,000 counts of accessory to murder earlier this year.

Her case and the charges against the 100-year-old suspect both rely on recent legal precedent in Germany establishing that anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted for accessory to the murders committed there.

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"It is with great sadness that we announce that Judith Kerr, author and illustrator of 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea,' 'When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit,' 'Mog the Forgetful Cat' and many other classic children's books, died at home yesterday aged 95 following a short illness," HarperCollins said.

Born in Berlin, Kerr's family left Germany in 1933 to escape the rise of the Nazi Party and came via Paris to England.

The family's struggle to get by as impoverished refugees in Paris and then wartime London formed the subject of Kerr's autobiographical trilogy that started with "When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit," published in 1971.

The book has been translated into many languages and taught to school children as an introduction to a dark chapter of history. It won the prestigious Youth Book Prize in Germany, and in 1993 a school was named after Kerr in her native city of Berlin.

In an interview with Reuters in 2015, Kerr said that as she had got older she began to think more often of the Jewish children from her generation who perished in the Holocaust, and of the lives they might have lived.

"If you've got a life that so many people didn't have, you can't waste it," she told Reuters.

As a young woman, Kerr worked as a textile designer, art teacher and scriptwriter at the BBC, before taking time out from work to raise her and her husband Tom's two children.

It was while looking after her daughter Tacy when she was a toddler that Kerr made up the story of a little girl and her mother who are having tea at home when a friendly tiger arrives unannounced, eats all the food and then leaves, never to return.

"Talk to the tiger," Tacy would often say, and years later, when both of Kerr's children were at school and she was wondering what to do next, she came up with the idea of a book.

"The Tiger Who Came To Tea" came out in 1968 to critical acclaim and has been a bestseller ever since, with "Mog the Forgetful Cat" following in 1970, the first of a long series.

Kerr was often asked whether the tiger has a hidden meaning, and some have suggested that it might represent Hitler or the Nazis, invading her home and stealing her possessions. Kerr dismissed this, saying the idea for the tiger simply came from a visit to the zoo with Tacy, and the creature was harmless.

"I never think about telling small children what to think," she told Reuters with a grin in 2015.

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A proposed new law in Poland would outlaw publicly and falsely attributing Nazi Germany's crimes in World War II to the Polish nation. The U.S. has joined Israel in criticizing it, saying it would impact freedom of expression.

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel took to Twitter Saturday to write, "These are German camps, there is no doubt about that. … This organized mass murder was carried out by our country and no one else. Individual collaborators change nothing about that."

Gabriel added, "We are convinced that only carefully appraising our own history can bring reconciliation. That includes people who had to experience the intolerable suffering of the Holocaust being able to speak unrestrictedly about this suffering."

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