Josef Schütz, will be 101 years old on November 16.
This makes him the oldest accused of Nazi crimes.
While the trial of this former guard of a concentration camp opened this Thursday in Germany, his lawyer said that "the accused will not speak" on the facts with which he is accused.
Former master corporal of the "Totenkopf" (Skull) division of the Waffen-SS, he is being prosecuted for "complicity in the murders" of 3,518 prisoners when he was operating in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, not far from Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
The accused was 21 years old at the beginning of the events.
He is particularly suspected of having shot Soviet prisoners, "of aid and complicity in systematic murders" by Zyklon B-type gas and "by detention of prisoners in hostile conditions".
Between its opening in 1936 and its liberation by the Soviets on April 22, 1945, the Sachsenhausen camp saw some 200,000 prisoners, mainly political opponents, Jews and homosexuals.
Several tens of thousands of them died, victims mainly of exhaustion due to forced labor and cruel conditions of detention.
"A bastard who refuses the possibility of guilt"
Appearing free, Josef Schütz entered the room using a walker, hiding his face from the photographers with a cardboard sleeve. The man lives in Brandenburg, a neighboring region of Berlin, has been a widower since 1986. This first of 22 scheduled hearings, which ended after only an hour due to his precarious state of health, was devoted to reading some of the 134 pages of indictment by prosecutor Cyrill Klement.
His desire not to speak out on the facts and in particular the refusal of a possible pardon was coldly received by the civil parties.
"I am moved.
It's been 80 years since I lost my father and this guy is a dirty guy, a bastard who refuses the possibility of guilt, ”exclaimed Antoine Grumbach, 79 years old.
This Frenchman attends the opening of the trial in memory of his father, engaged in the Gaullist resistance and assassinated in March 1944 in Sachsenhausen.
Hope until the last hour
The lawyer for 11 of the 16 civil parties, including seven survivors, Thomas Walther, wanted to be more confident: “For the plaintiffs, the fact that he appeared for his trial is already a positive sign and (... ) something can happen.
Perhaps such a man will come to the conclusion before his last hour that he still wants to explain his past ”.
This trial takes place a week after the abortive one of Irmgard Furchner, 96, a former secretary of another Nazi concentration camp.
The reading of the indictment was postponed until October 19 after an incredible attempt to flee the nonagenarian.
A symbolic sentence
For ten years, Germany has tried and condemned four former SS by extending to the camp guards and other executors of the Nazi machinery the count of complicity in murder, illustrating the increased severity, although considered very late by the victims, of his justice. Thus Josef Schütz "is not accused of having shot someone in particular, but of having contributed to these acts through his work as a guard and of having been aware that such murders took place in the camps" , explains the spokesperson for the parquet floor of Neuruppin, Iris le Claire.
Theoretically, he risks at least 3 years in prison but his sentence will certainly be symbolic given his great age.
The trial is held exceptionally in a gymnasium, near the home of the accused to save him long trips.
“The main function of this trial is memory,” explains Guillaume Mouralis, research director at CNRS and member of the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin.
In July 2020, a court imposed a two-year suspended prison sentence on a former Stutthof camp guard, Bruno Dey, 93 years old.
Eight other files of former SS are currently examined by various German prosecutors.
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