Prosecutors accused him of complicity 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 gladly supported this mass extermination with your actions,” the judge said Tuesday as his verdict was read at a gymnasium in the town of Brandenburg an der Havel, where he lives. .
According to Deutsche Welle, the man, identified internationally as Josef Schuetz and in Germany as Josef S. under privacy law, has repeatedly denied the allegations and was at the time working in a farm in another part of the country. claims to have been a His identity was not revealed at the sentencing hearing.
According to Agence France-Presse, on the final day of his trial on Monday, Schuetz said, “I don’t know why I’m here. Waterkamp previously told AFP he would appeal the conviction.
According to Deutsche Welle, Schuetz is the oldest person to be tried in Germany for complicity in Nazi crimes during World War II.
As The Post previously reported, Schuetz’s trial and recent conviction “will put an end to the aging Holocaust survivors and their families, as more and more Nazi personnel and their victims die of old age.” It reflects how law enforcement officers are racing against time to hit.”
Through Schuetz’s trial, which began in October and was interrupted several times due to apparent ill health, prosecutors determined, based on old identification documents, that he was a Nazi guard in Sachsenhausen from 1942 to 1945. created the evidence. According to AFP, they aided and abetted the killing of various groups of prisoners by means of firing squads and poison gas.
Sachsenhausen was a forced labor and death camp where Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and other persecuted ethnic minorities were killed by gunfire and gas chambers. The camp he was liberated by Soviet forces in April 1945.
During his trial, Schuetz said he had no idea what was happening in the concentration camps and gave contradictory accounts of his whereabouts during World War II, AFP reported.
According to German news agency dpa, presiding judge Udo Rechtermann told Schuetz: “We have come to the conclusion that, contrary to your claims, you worked as a guard in a concentration camp for about three years.” said.
A German court convicted 91-year-old John Demjanjuk in 2011, accused of complicity in 28,000 murders while working as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. was dropped.
The court’s decision paved the way for a conviction that largely depended on whether the defendant worked in the Nazi death camps where the crimes were committed. He had to prove he had committed the crime — a higher bar considering the alleged events happened decades ago. Demjanjuk, who died in 2012, denied ever having been a security guard.
Elderly former Nazi convicts are not typically expected to serve time in prison, but by prosecuting and convicting them, they can restore some degree of justice to the descendants of their victims and help them commit their crimes. Some argue that it is possible to prevent
In another high-profile case, Irmgard Furchner, who was executed hours before his trial last year, is still awaiting sentencing.
The 97-year-old worked as a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. When he was only 18, Fruchner became private secretary to the camp commander Paul Werner in his Hoppe. She is charged with complicity in her 11,380 murders.
According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Fruchner married a former SS officer after the war and is said to have kept in touch with Hoppe and one of the former executioners of the concentration camp. During her trial, she claimed her innocence and that she had no say in where she was stationed during the war.
Andrew Jeong and Florian Neuhof from Berlin contributed to this report.
