Nazi guard, 101, jailed over 3,500 Holocaust murders
Five years for concentration camp horrors
A 101-yeAr-old former Nazi concentration camp guard was sentenced to jail yesterday for his part in 3,500 murders during the Holocaust.
Josef Schuetz, the oldest person ever tried for Nazi-era crimes, served at Sachsenhausen in Germany between 1942 and 1945.
He had pleaded total innocence, claiming he had worked as a farm hand during the war despite historical documents proving otherwise. At the close of this trial on Monday he had said: ‘I don’t know why I am here.’
But presiding judge Udo Lechtermann said yesterday he was convinced Schuetz had been at the camp and ‘supported’ the atrocities committed there.
‘You watched prisoners being tortured and killed before your eyes,’ Judge lechtermann said.
‘Anyone who tried to escape from the camp was shot. So every guard was actively involved in these murders.’
Lithuanian-born Schuetz was handed a five-year jail sentence for being an accessory to murder, but he is unlikely to serve it behind bars given his age.
His lawyer Stefan Waterkamp said he would appeal, meaning the sentence will not be enforced until next year at the earliest.
Schuetz was a low-ranking SS guard and started working at the camp in oranienburg, north of Berlin, when he was 21.
Some 20,000 out of 200,000 prisoners, including Jews and other enemies of the reich, perished there – from forced labour, murder, medical experiments, hunger or disease.
Schuetz showed no emotion as the court, in a converted sports hall near Berlin to accommodate his mobility and medical needs, read out his fate.
During the trial – postponed several times because of his health – he made several inconsistent statements about his past, complaining that his head was getting ‘mixed up’.
After the war, Schuetz spent time in a russian prison camp, then worked as a farmer and a locksmith in Germany.
German prosecutors are racing to bring the last surviving Nazi perpetrators to justice before they die.