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A German court has found a 101-year-old former concentration camp guard guilty of being complicit in thousands of murders and sentenced him to five years in prison, the latest in a series of prosecutions against ex-Nazis. in the country.
The centenarian, who has maintained his innocence during his trial for months at the state court in Neuruppin in eastern Germany, was convicted on Tuesday of more than 3,500 charges to carry out the murder.
Prosecutors have accused him of being complicit in the murder of thousands of Jews, political prisoners and other minorities persecuted by the Nazis in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1942 and 1945.
“You supported this mass extermination with your activity,” a judge told the man on Tuesday as his verdict was read at a gym in the town of Brandenburg an der Havel, where he lives.
An alleged 100-year-old Nazi guard will be tried for thousands of charges of murder
The man, identified internationally as Josef Schuetz and as Josef S. in Germany because of privacy laws, has repeatedly denied the allegations and claimed that at the time he was an agricultural worker in a different area of the country, according to Deutsche Welle. He was not identified in his sentencing hearing.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Schuetz said on the last day of his trial Monday, according to Agence France Presse. His lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post. Waterkamp previously told AFP he would appeal a guilty verdict.
According to Deutsche Welle, Schuetz is the oldest person ever tried in Germany for complicity in Nazi crimes during World War II.
As The Post has previously reported, Schuetz’s trial and recent conviction “reflects how law enforcement officials are running against time to shut down elderly Holocaust survivors and their families, as more and more more Nazi personnel and their victims die in old age. “
A 96-year-old former Nazi camp secretary was supposed to be tried. Instead, he tried to flee.
Throughout Schuetz’s trial, which began in October and has been stopped several times due to his apparent ill health, prosecutors relied on old identification documents to build a case that was Nazi guard in Sachsenhausen between 1942 and 1945, a period during which they alleged that he helped and instigated the murder of different groups of prisoners by means of a firing squad and poison gas, according to AFP.
Tens of thousands of people died in Sachsenhausen, a forced labor and extermination 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.
During his trial, Schuetz said he did not know what was happening in the concentration camp and gave contradictory accounts of his whereabouts during World War II, AFP reported.
“The court has come to the conclusion that, contrary to what you say, he worked in the concentration camp as a guard for about three years,” 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 being an accomplice to 28,000 murders while working as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland.
The court’s decision paved the way for convictions that relied heavily on whether the accused had served in a Nazi death camp where crimes had taken place. Prosecutors had to previously prove that the defendant had committed specific crimes against someone, a higher threshold, since the alleged incidents took place decades ago. Demjanjuk, who died in 2012, denied he had been on guard.
While elders convicted of being former Nazis are not normally expected to spend time in prison, some argue that prosecuting and convicting them can restore justice to the descendants of their victims and ensure that their crimes they are not recognized.
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Andrew Jeong contributed to this report.