The oldest person ever to stand trial for participating in war crimes committed during the Holocaust, a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard received a five-year prison term on Tuesday from a German court.
According to presiding judge Udo Lechtermann, Josef Schuetz was found guilty of being an accessory to murder while serving as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
Nevertheless, considering his age and despite his conviction, it is extremely improbable that he will be sent to prison to fulfill the five-year term.
The retiree, who was born in Lithuania and now resides in Brandenburg state, pled innocent, claiming he did “absolutely nothing” and was unaware of the horrifying acts taking on in the camp.
At the conclusion of his trial on Monday, Schuetz, who is the oldest person to date to be tried for Nazi war crimes committed during the Holocaust, remarked, “I don’t know why I am here.”
However, prosecutors testified before the Neuruppin Regional Court, which is sitting in a prison recreation center at Brandenburg a der Havel, that Schueltz “knowingly and willfully” took part in the camp killings of 3,518 inmates, and they demanded that he be given a five-year jail sentence.
It is understood that Schuetz will undergo a medical check to determine he is fit to go to prison. He is also understood to be appealing the conviction – and due to the time it will take the Supreme Court to process the appeal, it could take up to 12 months before he goes to prison.
More than 200,000 people, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people, were detained at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1936 and 1945.
Before Soviet soldiers liberated the camp, tens of thousands of prisoners perished through forced labor, murder, medical experimentation, starvation, or sickness, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.
According to the prosecution, Schuetz 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.”
At the time, he was age 21.
The brutal “neck shot” facility was used to execute the Soviet POWs.
Here, SS soldiers pretended to be doctors concerned about the welfare of the captives by dressing in white hospital scrubs. Then they measured the convicts as they were lined up against a wall.
Other armed SS guards used the measurements as a setup for their weapons in a nearby room. They would shoot into the prisoner’s neck via a slit in the wall.
For 80 years, Josef Schuetz was able to avoid prosecution.
Throughout the trial, Schuetz mumbled that his brain was “getting messed up” and made a number of contradictory claims about his history.
The elderly guy claimed at one time that he spent the majority of World War II working as an agricultural laborer in Germany, a claim that was refuted by a number of old records that contained his name, birthdate, and place of birth.
After the war, Schuetz was transferred to a prison camp in Russia before returning to Germany, where he worked as a farmer and a locksmith.
Schuetz remained at liberty during the trial, which began in 2021 but has been delayed several times because of his health.
His lawyer Stefan Waterkamp told AFP ahead of the verdict that if found guilty, he would appeal.
Schuetz evaded justice for decades, but his luck ran out in 2018 when Investigators from the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg came across the name of Josef Schuetz in the old files in the State Military Archive in Moscow.
These so-called ‘booty files’ were taken by Russian soldiers to Moscow at the end of the war.
Meanwhile Holocaust survivor and contemporary witness Leon Schwarzbaum, 100, told press this was ‘the last trial for my friends, acquaintances and loved ones who were murdered, in which the last guilty party will hopefully be convicted.’
A month later, Josef Schuetz celebrated his 101st birthday. By March 2022, Leon Schwarzbaum had passed away.
Thomas Walther, a lawyer representing several camp survivors and victims’ relatives, told the court in May: ‘What can possibly be a fitting punishment, when the leading SS officers in the Reich Security Main Office were indicted for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, but were able to get off scot-free, because of the lapse in time and their “incapacity to stand trial”?’
‘What can possibly be a fitting punishment for a 101 year old man who is having to face up to his own responsibility after 80 years after committing the crime, and who could have been taken to court 70, or 50, or 30, or most definitely 10 years ago?’
‘Over the past years it has been general practice that, in their closing remarks, the representatives of joint plaintiffs refrain from stating any figures when calling for a particular sentence.
‘Nevertheless, I must state here that a sentence of less than five years imprisonment would be extremely difficult for my clients to comprehend, even if the defendant were to change his mind and express some kind of remorse in his “final statement”.
Some of the most damning evidence against Schuetz included the material presented by concentration camp expert, historian Dr. Stefan Hoerdler.
This included a document from the Central Immigration Office (EWZ) dated 1941 that showed the whole Lithuanian Schuetz family.
The record included Josef Schuetz’s mother Maria, born in 1886, his father Wilhelm, born in 1862, as well as six of his seven siblings, all born between 1911 and 1927.
Along with passport images, the date of birth and other personal information are included here.
The identical image of Josef Schuetz that may be seen on an SS document was placed underneath this.
Even though his name, birthdate, and military position at the time are all stated on several official records, Schuetz has persisted in saying through his attorney that he never visited Sachsenhausen camp.
These include documents from the Koblenz Federal Archives, the Stasi (East German secret service) archives, and the archives at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial site.
The material shows that Schuetz served in six different companies of SS guards from October 23, 1941 to February 18, 1945 and that during this period, he was promoted from the rank of Private to SS-Rottenführer (Corporal) at Sachsenhausen.
German prosecutors are vying for the last living Nazi offenders to be brought to court more than seven decades after the end of World War II.
A judicial precedent was established and numerous of these twilight justice cases were made possible by the 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk on the grounds that he participated in Hitler’s killing machine.
Since then, courts have found other defendants guilty on such grounds rather than for murders or other crimes they had a direct connection to.
Oskar Groening, an Auschwitz accountant, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz, were two of those brought to justice after the fact.
Both were convicted at the age of 94 of complicity in mass murder but died before they could be imprisoned.
A former SS guard, Bruno Dey, was found guilty at the age of 93 in 2020 and was given a two-year suspended sentence.
Separately, in the northern German town of Itzehoe, a 96-year-old former secretary in a Nazi death camp is on trial for complicity in murder.
Irmgard Furchner, a typist known as the “Secretary of Evil,” is charged with helping to cover up the death of 11,412 people at the camp while serving as the SS commander at Stutthof. Furchner disputes the accusations.
Before her trial began, she abruptly took off, but she was apprehended some hours later.
She wheeled herself into the courtroom in Itzehoue, northern Germany, on Tuesday to continue her trial.
Guillaume Mouralis, a research professor at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), said that while some have questioned the prudence of pursuing convictions for Nazi atrocities so many years after the events, such trials convey an essential message.
‘It is a question of reaffirming 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,’ he told AFP.