Elder Josef Schütz, once an SS guard, was sentenced today for aiding and abetting the murder of about 3,500 people at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He is the oldest person convicted of Nazi war crimes in Germany, and his sentence brought one of the last remaining Nazi trials to an end. Due to his health and age, it is unlikely that the man will serve any prison sentence.
Prosecutors said Josef S., a member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary SS, helped send 3,518 people to their deaths at the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin, by regularly between 1942 and 1945 in the watchtower to wait.
Josef Schütz was born on November 16, 1921 in Lithuania. By 1942 he was working in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where one of his duties was stationed in the Watchtower. He remained at the camp until the end of the war in 1945.
After the war he was released as a prisoner of war in 1947, after which he moved to East Germany where he worked as a locksmith.
He was married at one point, but in 1986 he became a widower. By 2021, I was living in the northeastern state of Brandenburg, Germany.
The trial took nearly nine months, as doctors said he was only partially fit to be tried, and sessions were limited to two and a half hours a day.
Some people interned in Sachsenhausen were killed with Zyklon-B, the poison gas also used in other extermination camps where millions of Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
During the trial, Schütz said he did “absolutely nothing” wrong and was unaware of the atrocities that happened at Sachsenhausen.
Instead, he said he worked as a “farm worker near Pasewalk in northeastern Germany during the period in question”, a claim the court rejected.
The court used historical documents to prove that he worked at the camp and was a non-commissioned officer in the Waffen-SS.
READ MORE: Boris Johnson compares Russia to Nazi Germany