Berlin — A former Nazi focus camp guard was sentenced Tuesday to 5 years in jail for "complicity in murders throughout his service within the Sachsenhausen camp" between 1942 and 1945. At 101, Josef Schütz was the oldest individual ever to face trial for crimes dedicated by the Nazi regime.
Addressing Schütz within the courtroom in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, decide Udo Lechtermann, instructed the previous guard that he had been "conscious that prisoners have been killed there," and that by his "presence, you supported [these acts]. Anybody who wished to flee the camp was shot. Thus, each camp guard actively participated in these murders."
Given Schütz's age and poor well being, he's unlikely to really serve any time behind bars.
Over the course of greater than 30 hearings within the case, which was postponed a number of instances because of the defendant's well being, he by no means expressed any remorse. Quite the opposite, in court docket on Monday, he as soon as once more denied any involvement within the Nazi regime's genocide, asking aloud why he was even there and insisting "all the pieces is fake" in regards to the fees towards him.
Schütz has supplied a number of accounts of his previous, a few of them contradictory, and has admitted that at his age, "all the pieces is torn aside" in his head.
Just lately he claimed to have left Lithuania at first of World Conflict II to stay in Germany, however he mentioned he merely spent the warfare years engaged on a farm.
"I pulled up timber, planted timber," he instructed the court docket, saying he by no means even wore a German uniform.
However that account is contested by a number of historic paperwork introduced to the court docket, figuring out him by his identify, date and place of origin, saying he was assigned from the top of 1942 till the start of 1945 to the Totenkopf ("demise's head") division of the Nazis' infamous SS paramilitary power.
Schütz was 21 when the paperwork present his service with the SS started. He is suspected of getting shot Soviet prisoners, of "aiding and abetting systematic murders" by way of Zyklon B fuel, and of "holding prisoners in hostile situations" on the Sachsenhausen camp, which was solely about 20 miles north of Berlin.
In his closing assertion, delivered to the court docket in mid-Might, public prosecutor Cyrill Klement mentioned the proof introduced by the prosecution was "totally confirmed," reproaching Schütz for not solely having accepted the situations on the camp, however for making a profession of it.
There's "little doubt that Mr. Schütz labored in Sachsenhausen," Klement insisted. He had referred to as for a sentence longer than the minimal three years doable for the cost of complicity in murders.
"A sentence of lower than 5 years couldn't be accepted by the plaintiffs," mentioned Thomas Walther, a lawyer who represented 11 of the 16 plaintiffs within the case, together with seven Holocaust survivors.
Between its opening in 1936 and its liberation by the Soviet military on April 22, 1945, the Sachsenhausen camp held about 200,000 prisoners, together with political dissidents, Jews and other people accused of homosexuality. Tens of 1000's of them died, many succumbing to the cruel situations within the compelled labor camp.
After a protracted interval of reluctance to place all surviving perpetrators of the Nazis' crimes on trial, Germany has expanded its investigations during the last decade. Whereas proving particular crimes is usually tough given the lengthy interval that has handed, camp guards and different particular person cogs within the Nazi machine can and are being prosecuted on the cost of complicity in homicide.