A 101-year-old man has been sentenced to a five-year jail term for his actions while working at a concentration camp during World War II.
According to the BBC, he was a former concentration camp guard at Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, and the oldest Nazi criminal to ever stand trial in a German court. France 24 identified the man as Josef Schuetz.
Although he was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murders of 3,518 people, Schuetz has denied that he was ever an SS guard at Sachsenhausen, which was built in 1936. More than 200,000 prisoners there – including Jewish people, Roma people and queer people – died as a result of hunger, disease, forced labor, mistreatment and systematic extermination operations by the SS.
“I don’t know why I’m sitting here in the sin bin,” Schuetz said, according to the BBC.” I really had nothing to do with it.”
He claimed at one point to have been an agricultural laborer in Germany for most of World War II, while Nazis were committing genocide against various groups. This claim was contradicted by several historical documents bearing Schuetz’s name, date and place of birth.
The 101-year-old, who entered the courtroom in a wheelchair, said that his head was getting “mixed up,” and made several contradictory statements, France 24 reported.
Records indicate he began working at Sachsenhausen in 1942, when he was 21 years old, and that he remained there for around three years.
“You willingly supported this mass extermination through your occupation,” said Judge Udo Lechtermann. Schuetz was found complicit in the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war and the murder of others with Zyklon B gas.
According to France 24, he was found guilty of being an accessory to murder in at least 3,500 cases.
“Due to your position on the watchtower of the concentration camp, you constantly had the smoke of the crematorium in your nose,” said Lechtermann. Since “anyone” who attempted to escape the camp was shot, the judge determined that Schuetz was likely actively involved in murders.
When ex-SS guard John Demjanjuk was found guilty for his service in 2011, a door opened to hold former Nazis accountable for their actions during the war and their participation the systemic murder of millions in the Holocaust.
“More than seven decades after World War II, German prosecutors are racing to bring the last surviving Nazi perpetrators to justice,” said France 24.
Other Nazis who have been sentenced include “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” Oskar Gröning, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz.
A 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary is currently on trial in northern Germany.
In October, CBS News reported that the secretary rejects that she is personally guilty of any crime, and that wheelchair-bound woman “tried to make a run for it when she hopped on a taxi the morning of her trial and didn't show up in court,” but was picked up by police.
So far, Schuetz sentence is the longest issued compared to similar cases.
Guillaume Mouralis, a research professor at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), said the verdict is “a warning to the perpetrators of mass crimes: whatever their level of responsibility, there is still legal liability.”
However, both the BBC and France 24 reported that it is unlikely that Schuetz, who was not detained during the trial, will serve any of his sentence due to his age. His attorneys also plan to appeal the decision, a process that would push the enforcement of his sentence to 2023.
Thomas Walther, a lawyer who represented 11 of the 16 civil parties in the trial, said the sentencing met their expectations. On the other hand, 80-year-old Antoine Grumbach, whose father died in Sachsenhausen, said he could “never forgive” Schuetz as “any human being facing atrocities has a duty to oppose them.”
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