A German court on Tuesday imposed a five-year prison sentence on a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, the oldest person so far to stand trial for complicity in war crimes during the Holocaust.
Josef Schuetz was convicted between 1942 and 1945 of being an accomplice to murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, Judge Udo Lechtermann said.
But despite his conviction, it is highly unlikely he will be put behind bars to serve the five-year prison sentence, given his age.
The Lithuanian-born pensioner, who now lives in the state of Brandenburg, pleaded not guilty, saying he had done ‘absolutely nothing’ and was unaware of the heinous crimes being committed at the camp.
“I do not know why I am here,” Schuetz, who is the oldest person to stand trial for Nazi war crimes committed during the Holocaust, said Monday at the conclusion of his trial.
But prosecutors told the Neuruppin Regional Court, which is being held in a prison sports hall in Brandenburg an der Havel, that Schueltz “knowingly and willingly” participated in the killings of 3,518 inmates at the camp and asked that he be five years old. be punished. behind bars.
More than 200,000 people, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people, were detained at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1936 and 1945.
Josef Schuetz was convicted between 1942 and 1945 of being an accomplice to murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, Judge Udo Lechtermann said.
Prosecutors say Schuetz “knowingly and willingly” participated as a guard at the camp in the crimes and sought to punish him with five years behind bars. In the photo: Holocaust survivor Leon Schwarzbaum holds a photo in the courtroom during the trial at the Landgericht Neuruppin court in October last year
Schuetz said he did “absolutely nothing” and was unaware of the heinous crimes being committed at the camp. In the photo: Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen in December 1938
What is the history of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and how many people were killed there?
The front gate of Sachsenhausen
- Built in the summer of 1936 by internet from other camps
- First concentration camp built after Himmler was made chief of police
- More than 200,000 people were interned between 1936 and 1945
- Prisoners included political opponents and those considered ‘racially inferior’, such as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and people persecuted as homosexuals
- Prisoners forced to work in factories
- 13,000 Soviet prisoners, including many Jews killed in the fall of 1941
- A gas chamber was built in the spring
Source: www.sachsenhausen-sbg.de
Tens of thousands of prisoners died from forced labor, murder, medical experiments, starvation or disease before the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.
Prosecutors said Schuetz assisted and assisted with the “execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942” and the murder of “the use of the toxic gas Cyclone B.”
He was then 21 years old.
During the trial, Schuetz made several inconsistent statements about his past, complaining that his head was getting ‘confused’.
At one point, the centenarian said he had worked as an agricultural worker in Germany for most of World War II, a claim contradicted by several historical documents containing his name, date and place of birth.
After the war, Schuetz was transferred to a prison camp in Russia before returning to Germany, where he worked as a farmer and locksmith.
Schuetz remained free during the trial, which began in 2021, but was delayed several times due to his health.
Before the verdict, his lawyer Stefan Waterkamp told AFP that if he was found guilty, he would appeal.
More than seven decades after World War II, German prosecutors are rushing to bring the last surviving Nazi perpetrators to justice.
The 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, on the grounds that he served as part of Hitler’s assassination machine, set a legal precedent and paved the way for several of these twilight justice cases.
Since then, courts have issued several convictions on these grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly related to the individual accused.
The 101-year-old former security guard of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp appeared in the courtroom on Tuesday before his trial at the Landgericht Neuruppin court in Brandenburg.
Among those convicted late were Oskar Groening, an accountant at Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz.
Both were convicted of complicity in mass murder at the age of 94, but died before being sent to prison.
A former SS guard, Bruno Dey, was convicted at the age of 93 in 2020 and was given a suspended sentence of two years.
Separately, a 96-year-old former secretary is on trial in a Nazi death camp in the northern German town of Itzehoe for complicity in murder.
She fled dramatically before the start of her trial, but was caught several hours later.
While some have questioned the wisdom of pursuing convictions related to Nazi crimes so long after the events, Guillaume Mouralis, a research professor at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), said such trials send an important be.
“It is a matter of reaffirming the political and moral responsibility of individuals in an authoritarian context (and in a criminal regime) at a time when neo-fascist right-wingers are strengthening throughout Europe,” he told AFP said.