A 101-year-old man has been convicted in Germany of 3,518 homicide cases on Tuesday for serving in a Nazi concentration camp in Sachsenhausen during World War II. The Neuruppin District Court sentenced him to five years in prison. The man, identified by local media as Josef S., had denied working as an SS guard in the camp and aiding and abetting the killing of thousands of detainees. In the trial, which began in October, the man said he had worked as a farm laborer near Pasewalk in northeastern Germany during that period. However, the court considered it proven that he worked in the camp on the outskirts of Berlin between 1942 and 1945 as a military member of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, the German news agency dpa reported. “The court concluded that, contrary to what you claim, you worked in the concentration camp as a guard for about three years,” said presiding judge Udo Lechtermann, according to the dpa, adding that in this way, the accused had assisted in the mechanisms of Nazi terrorism and assassination. “You have willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity,” Lechtermann said. Prosecutors had based their case on documents relating to an SS guard with the man’s name, date and place of birth, as well as other documents. The five-year prison sentence was in line with the prosecution’s request. However, the accused may appeal against the court decision. For organizational reasons, the trial took place in a gym in Brandenburg / Havel, the 101-year-old’s residence. The man was only able to stand trial to a limited extent and could only attend the trial for about two and a half hours each day. The trial was adjourned several times for reasons of health and hospital stay. Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, told the Associated Press that the sentence “sends a message that if you commit such crimes, even decades later, you may be brought to justice.” “And it is very important because it closes the relatives of the victims,” Zurov added. “The fact that these people suddenly feel that their loss is being addressed and that the suffering of their family that they lost in the camps is being addressed … is a very important thing.” The Sachsenhausen was founded 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 Nazi-built labyrinthine network throughout Germany, Austria and the Occupied Territories. More than 200,000 people were held there between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands of inmates died of starvation, disease, forced labor, and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations, including shootings, hangings, and gas. The exact numbers for the dead vary, with higher estimates being around 100,000, although researchers suggest that figures from 40,000 to 50,000 are probably more accurate. In its early years, most prisoners were either political prisoners or criminals, but some included Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. The first large group of Jewish prisoners was transferred there in 1938 after the so-called Night of the Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, an anti-Semitic pogrom. During the war, Sachsenhausen expanded to include thousands of Soviet prisoners of war – as well as others. As in other camps, the Jewish prisoners stood out in Sachsenhausen for particularly cruel treatment, and most who survived until 1942 were sent to the Auschwitz death camp. Sachsenhausen was liberated in April 1945 by the Soviets, who turned it into their own brutal camp. Tuesday’s verdict is based on a recent legal precedent in Germany, according to which anyone who helped run a Nazi camp could be prosecuted for complicity in the killings there. In a separate case, a 96-year-old woman was tried in late September in the northern German city of Itzehoe. The woman, who allegedly worked during the war as secretary to the SS commander at the Stutthof concentration camp, has been charged with more than 11,000 counts of additional murder.
