The Neuruppin district court has sentenced a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to five years in prison.

The court found the 101-year-old Josef S. guilty of aiding and abetting murder and attempted murder on Tuesday in Brandenburg an der Havel.

With the sentence, the judges followed the request of the public prosecutor's office.

The Chamber therefore came to the conclusion that S. had been deployed in the concentration camp for three years.

The accused "willingly supported the mass extermination" with his guard work, said the presiding judge Udo Lechtermann.

The prosecution had accused S. of being an accessory to murder in more than 3,500 cases.

Accordingly, between 1942 and 1945 he is said to have “knowingly and willingly” participated in the murder of camp inmates.

He is said to have belonged to the guard battalion of the concentration camp, in which the SS had stationed a large contingent, until 1945.

Prosecutors asked for five years in prison.

The defense, on the other hand, applied for an acquittal because their client could not be proven to have done anything specific to his work in the camp.

During the trial that began in October last year, the accused himself denied having worked in the camp.

In his last word before the verdict was announced, Josef S. again protested his innocence.

The hearing took place in a sports hall in Brandenburg an der Havel due to the proximity to S.'s place of residence and for reasons of space.

200,000 people interned

According to the memorial site, more than 200,000 people were interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945.

Tens of thousands of prisoners perished from starvation, disease, forced labour, medical experiments and abuse, or became victims of systematic extermination operations.

Only in recent years, after the verdicts against several former Auschwitz guards, did the German judiciary begin to look at the guards at concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen or Stutthof, which were not considered extermination camps.

In the past, the prevailing legal practice was that only those perpetrators who could be proven to have committed specific acts of violence were prosecuted.

Only with the verdict against Oskar Gröning, who became known as the “accountant” of Auschwitz, in 2015, at least with regard to extermination camps like Auschwitz, did the case law prevail that every knowing contribution to the functioning of camp events was an aid to the ongoing killings in the camp.

The concrete contribution to individual acts of killing no longer had to be proven.

In 2020, this view was applied for the first time in a judgment on the Stutthof concentration camp.