A German court has found a 101-year-old former concentration camp guard guilty of aiding and abetting thousands of murders and sentenced him to five years in prison – the latest in a series of former Nazi persecutions in the country. The centenarian – who has maintained his innocence throughout his months-long trial in East Germany’s Neuruppin state court – was convicted of more than 3,500 counts of aiding and abetting murder on Tuesday. Prosecutors accused him of taking part in the killing of thousands of Jews, political prisoners and other minorities persecuted by the Nazis at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. “You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity,” a judge told the man on Tuesday as his verdict was read at a gym in the city of Brandenburg an der Havel, where he lives. Alleged 100-year-old former Nazi guard will stand trial on thousands of charges of aiding and abetting murder The man, known internationally as Josef Schuetz and Josef S. in Germany because of his privacy laws, has repeatedly denied the allegations and claimed to have worked in agriculture in a different part of the country at the time, according to Deutsche Welle. He was not recognized at the hearing of his sentence. “I do not know why I am here,” Schuetz said on the final day of his trial on Monday, according to Agence-France Presse. His lawyer, Stephen Waterkamp, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Washington Post. Waterkamp previously told Agence France-Presse that he would appeal the guilt. According to Deutsche Welle, Schuetz is the oldest person ever tried in Germany for complicity in Nazi crimes during World War II. As previously reported by The Post, Schuetz’s trial and recent conviction “reflect the way law enforcement is struggling over time to shut down elderly Holocaust survivors and their families, as well as increasingly “Nazis and their victims die of old age.” A 96-year-old former secretary of the Nazi camp had to be tried. He tried to flee. Throughout Schuetz’s trial, which began in October and has been interrupted several times due to his apparent ill health, prosecutors relied on old identification documents to establish that he was a Nazi guard at Sachsenhausen between 1942 and 1945. a period during which they claimed to have aided and abetted the killing of different groups of detainees by gunfire and poison gas, according to the French Agency. Tens of thousands of people died in Sachsenhausen, a forced labor and death camp where Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and other persecuted minorities were killed by gunfire and a gas chamber. The camp was liberated by Soviet forces in April 1945. Schuetz told him throughout the trial that he did not know what was going on in the concentration camp and gave conflicting accounts of his whereabouts during World War II, the AFP news agency reported. “The court concluded that, contrary to what you claim, you worked in the concentration camp as a guard for about three years,” Judge President Udo Lechtermann told Schuetz, according to the German news agency dpa. A German court set a precedent in 2011 with the conviction of John Demjanjuk, a 91-year-old man accused of aiding and abetting 28,000 murders while working as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland. The court ruling paved the way for convictions based largely on whether the accused had served in a Nazi death camp where crimes had taken place. Prosecutors had to prove beforehand that the accused had committed specific crimes against someone – a higher threshold, since the alleged events took place decades ago. Demjanjuk, who died in 2012, denied being a guard. While seniors convicted as ex-Nazis are usually not expected to serve prison sentences, some argue that prosecuting and convicting them can restore justice to the descendants of their victims and ensure that their crimes go unpunished. US ousts former Nazi guard whose role during the war was marked on a card found between a sunken ship Andrew Jeong contributed to this report.
