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A German court has found a 101-year-old former concentration camp warden guilty of complicity in thousands of murders and sentenced him to five years in prison – the latest in a series of prosecutions of former Nazis in the country.
The 100-year-old – who maintained his innocence throughout his lengthy trial in the state court of Neuruppin in East Germany – was convicted on Tuesday of more than 3,500 charges of complicity in the murder.
Prosecutors accused him of complicity in the killing of thousands of Jews, political prisoners and other minorities persecuted by the Nazis in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1942 to 1945.
“You readily supported this mass destruction with your activities,” a judge told the man on Tuesday as his sentence was read at a high school in the city of Brandenburg an der Havel, where he lives.
100-year-old alleged former Nazi guard will be tried on thousands of charges of complicity in murder
The man, identified internationally as Josef Schuez and Josef S. in Germany due to privacy laws, has repeatedly denied the allegations and claimed to have been an agricultural worker in a different part of the country at the time, according to Deutsche Welle. He was not identified during the sentencing hearing.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Schuez said on the last day of his trial on Monday, according to Agence-France Presse. His lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post. Earlier, Watercamp told AFP that he would appeal the conviction.
According to Deutsche Welle, Schuez is the oldest man ever tried in Germany for complicity in Nazi crimes during World War II.
As The Post previously reported, the trial against Schuez and the recent sentencing “reflect how law enforcement officials are racing against time to finish off adult Holocaust survivors and their families as more and more Nazi personnel and their victims die.” in old age ‘.
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During the trial against Schuez, which began in October and was suspended several times due to his apparent ill health, prosecutors relied on old identity documents to establish a case that he was a Nazi guard in Sachsenhausen between 1942 and 1945, during which time they claimed he had aided and abetted the killing of various groups of prisoners by shooting and poison gas, according to AFP.
Tens of thousands of people died in Sachsenhausen, forced labor and a 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 troops in April 1945.
During the trial, Schuez said he did not know what was happening in the concentration camp and gave conflicting information about his whereabouts during World War II, AFP reported.
“The court concluded that, contrary to what you claim, you worked in the concentration camp as a security guard for about three years,” President Judge Udo Lechtermann told Schuez, according to the German news agency dpa.
A German court set a precedent in 2011 with the conviction of 91-year-old John Demianyuk, accused of complicity in 28,000 murders while working as a security guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland.
The court ruling paved the way for convictions that are largely based on whether the defendant served in a Nazi death camp where crimes were committed. Previously, prosecutors had to prove that the accused had committed specific crimes against someone – a higher threshold, given that the alleged events took place decades ago. Demjanjuk, who died in 2012, denied being a security guard.
While older people convicted of being former Nazis are not usually expected to spend time in prison, some argue that prosecuting and convicting them can restore some justice to the descendants of their victims and ensure that crimes they will not remain unrecognized.
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Andrew Jeong contributed to this report.
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