Former Nazi camp guard, 101, sentenced to 5 years in prison
BERLIN — A 101-yearold man was convicted in Germany of more than 3,500 counts of accessory to murder Tuesday for serving at the Nazis’ Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II.
The Neuruppin Regional Court sentenced him to five years in prison.
The man, identified by local media as Josef S., had denied working as an SS guard at the camp and aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of prisoners.
In the trial, which opened in October, the centenarian said that he had worked as a farm laborer in northeastern Germany during the period in question.
However, the court considered it proven that he worked at the camp on the outskirts of Berlin between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the German news agency dpa reported.
“You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity,” presiding judge Udo Lechtermann
said. “You watched deported people being cruelly tortured and murdered there every day for three years.”
Prosecutors had based their case on documents relating to an SS guard with the man’s name, date and place of birth, as well as other documents.
The five-year prison sentence was in line with the prosecution’s demand.
The defendant’s lawyer had sought an acquittal. Defense attorney Stefan Waterkamp said he would appeal.
Germany’s leading Jewish group welcomed the ruling.
“Even if the defendant will probably not serve the full prison sentence due to his advanced age, the verdict is to be welcomed,” said Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
For practical reasons, the trial was held in a gymnasium in Brandenburg an der Havel, the 101-year-old’s place of residence. The man was only fit to stand trial to a limited extent and was only able to participate in the trial for about 2 ½hours each day. The process was interrupted several times for health reasons and hospital stays.
Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Jerusalem, said the sentence “sends a message that if you commit such crimes, even decades later, you might be brought to justice.”
Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 near Berlin as the first new site after Adolf Hitler gave the SS full control of the Nazi concentration camp system.
More than 200,000 people were held there between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands died of starvation, disease, forced labor and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations.
Sachsenhausen was liberated by the Soviets, who then turned it into a brutal camp of their own.
The verdict relies on recent legal precedent in Germany establishing that anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted for being an accessory to the murders committed there.