Ex-Nazi guard, 101-yr-old, gets five-year prison term

CHENNAI: The oldest individual ever to stand trial for participating in war crimes committed during the Holocaust was a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard who was given a five-year prison sentence by a German court.

Josef Schütz, who served as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, was found guilty on Tuesday of being an accessory to murder.

Schütz had claimed that he was unaware of the crimes being committed at the camp and that he did "absolutely nothing." At the conclusion of the trial on Monday, he stated, "I don't know why I am here. Although Schütz was not charged with actually carrying out any of the murders, prosecutors said that he "knowingly and deliberately" assisted in the killing of 3,518 detainees at the camp in his capacity as a guard.

Between 1936 and 1945, Sachsenhausen housed more than 200,000 prisoners, among them Jews, Roma, opponents of the dictatorship, and homosexuals. Before Soviet soldiers liberated the camp, tens of thousands of prisoners were either murdered or perished from forced labour, medical experiments, hunger, or sickness, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.

According to the prosecution, Schütz participated in both the 1942 death of Soviet prisoners of war by firing squad and the murder of detainees "using the toxic chemical Zyklon B." His age at the time was 21.

Despite his conviction and sentence, the centenarian is highly unlikely to be imprisoned given his age. Before the verdict, Stefan Waterkamp, his attorney, stated that if he were found guilty, he would file an appeal. The attorney argued that a conviction for guilt should not be based solely on employment as a security guard at a concentration camp, citing a judgement of the federal court of justice in Karlsruhe.