A German court sentenced a 101-year-old man on Tuesday for working in a Nazi concentration camp. Josef Schütz is the oldest person to be convicted of crimes committed by authorities in the country during World War II.
A former noncommissioned officer in the Waffen SS, a Nazi combat unit, he was sentenced to five years in prison for complicity in the murder of 3,518 prisoners between 1942 and 1945 at Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin, where he served as a guard.
“Mr Schütz, you played an active role for three years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where you were an accomplice in mass murder,” said court president Udo Lechtermann. “All the people who wanted to flee the camp were shot. Therefore, any guard in the camp took an active part in the killings,” said the judge.
Schütz remained impassive during the reading of the sentence, exceeding the three years in prison provided for in German law for cases of complicity in murder. “I’m ready,” he said hours before the trial, when he was wheeled into the courtroom.
The defense lawyer had already announced that he would appeal in the event of a very harsh sentence, which should delay the execution of the sentence at least until the beginning of 2023. Given the advanced age and fragile health of the accused, who remained free during the process, it is unlikely that he will be arrested.
At no point in the nearly 30 hearings in the case did the defendant express any sign of regret. On Monday (27), before the end of the trial, he again denied any responsibility for the crimes of which he is accused. “I don’t know why I’m here. I tell the truth. I have nothing to do with the police and the army, everything that has been said is false,” said the accused, his voice shaky.
Josef Schütz presented several accounts of his past, sometimes contradictory. He recently claimed that he left Lithuania at the beginning of the Second World War to go to Germany, where he would have worked as a farm worker throughout the conflict. “I cut down and planted trees,” he said, after swearing he never wore a German uniform, but “work clothes.”
This version, however, is contested by several historical documents that mention, among other data, his name, date and place of birth, which indicate that the accused actually worked, from the end of 1942 to the beginning of 1945, in the “Totenkopf” division. of the Waffen-SS.
At the age of 21 at the beginning of the investigation, Schütz was accused, among other things, of having shot Soviet prisoners, of “aiding and abetting systematic assassinations” by Zyklon B gas and of “detaining prisoners in hostile conditions”. After the war, he was transferred to a prison camp in Russia and then moved to Brandenburg, a city near Berlin, where he worked as a farmer and locksmith, without being investigated by the authorities.
“This sentence meets the expectations of the plaintiffs, justice has been done”, celebrated Thomas Walther, lawyer for 11 of the 16 civil parties who participated in the process.
For Guillaume Mouralis, director of investigations at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), this verdict represents “a warning to the perpetrators of mass crimes”.
Between opening in 1936 and its liberation by the Soviets on April 22, 1945, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp held nearly 200,000 prisoners, particularly political opponents, Jews and homosexuals.
Tens of thousands of prisoners died, victims mainly of exhaustion from forced labor and the cruel conditions of detention.
Despite having only been a camp guard, Schütz was sentenced to a severe sentence compared to other recent sentences, which illustrates a change in justice in Germany, which in the last 10 years has expanded its investigations and started to prosecute concentration camp guards. and other enforcers of the Nazi machine.
