The historic trial of the oldest accused of Nazi crimes ended on Tuesday in Germany.
Josef Schütz, 101-year-old former concentration camp guard, was sentenced to 5 years in prison for "complicity" in thousands of murders, announced the president of the court of Brandenburg an der Havel (east), Udo Lechtermann.
He had been on trial since October 2021 for abuses committed during his service in the Sachsenhausen camp, between 1942 and 1945. Justice accused this former Waffen SS non-commissioned officer of being involved in the murder of 3,518 prisoners.
He expressed no regrets
Never during the thirty hearings at the court of Brandenburg-sur-la-Havel, several times postponed because of the fragile health of the accused, Josef Schütz will not have expressed the slightest regret.
On the contrary, on Monday he again denied any involvement, wondering “why he was there”, and affirmed that “everything is false” about him.
Josef Schütz has advanced several, sometimes contradictory, stories about his past.
"Everything is torn" in my head, he even slipped at the opening of the hearing before being interrupted by his lawyer.
Lately, he claimed to have left Lithuania at the start of the Second World War to join Germany where he would have worked as an agricultural laborer throughout the conflict: "I uprooted trees, planted trees", he said. he explained to the bar, swearing to have never worn a German uniform but a "blue work".
A version contested by several historical documents mentioning in particular his name, date and place of birth proving that he had indeed been assigned from the end of 1942 to the beginning of 1945 to the “Totenkopf” (Death’s Head) division of the Waffen-SS.
After the war, he was transferred to a prison camp in Russia and then settled in Brandenburg, a region neighboring Berlin.
He was successively a farmer, then a locksmith and was never worried.
VIDEO: Germany puts 100-year-old on trial for Nazi crimes.
Josef Schuetz, a former member of the Waffen-SS's "Totenkopf" (Death's Head) division, is on trial for "knowingly and willingly" assisting in the murder of 3,518 prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp pic.twitter.com/p2gN1WYVcb
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) October 8, 2021
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"Complicity in Systematic Murders"
Aged 21 at the start of the charges, he was accused of having shot Soviet prisoners, "aiding and abetting systematic murder" by Zyklon B type gas and "holding prisoners in hostile conditions".
During his indictment in mid-May, Attorney General Cyrill Klement considered "fully confirmed the evidence of the prosecution", accusing him of not only having accommodated the conditions of the camp but of having made a career there.
There is "no doubt that Mr. Schütz worked in Sachsenhausen", he hammered, before requesting a longer sentence than the minimum of three years in prison for complicity in murder.
Stefan Waterkamp, Josef Schütz's lawyer, had pleaded for his acquittal and announced that he intended to appeal in the event of conviction, making any imprisonment even more unlikely.
A belated justice
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.
Tens of thousands of them perished, victims mainly of exhaustion due to forced labor and the cruel conditions of detention.
After having long shown little eagerness to judge all the perpetrators of Nazi crimes, Germany has been expanding its investigations for ten years.
Camp guards and other executors of the Nazi machinery can be prosecuted on the charge of complicity in murder.
In recent years, four former SS men have been convicted in this capacity.
This late trial made it possible to "reaffirm the political and moral responsibility of individuals in an authoritarian context, and in a criminal regime, at a time when the neo-fascist far right is strengthening everywhere in Europe", had confided before the verdict Guillaume Mouralis, research director at the CNRS and member of the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin.
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