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 sentence on Tuesday from a German court.
According to presiding judge Udo Lechtermann, Josef Schuetz was found guilty of being an accessory to murder while working 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 serve 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 at 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 in Brandenburg a der Havel, that Schueltz “knowingly and willfully” took part in the camp murders of 3,518 inmates, and they demanded that he be given a five-year jail sentence.
According to what is known, Schuetz will have a medical examination to see if he is healthy enough to serve time in jail. He is also rumored to be appealing the conviction, which may delay his sentencing by up to 12 months while the Supreme Court considers the case.
Between 1936 and 1945, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp housed almost 200,000 inmates, including Jews, Roma, opposition figures, and homosexuals.
Before Soviet troops liberated the camp, tens of thousands of prisoners perished from forced labor, murder, medical experiments, hunger, 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 while 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 head was “getting messed up” and made a number of contradictory claims about his past.
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.
Schuetz was sent to a Russian prison camp after the war and then relocated back to Germany, where he worked as a farmer and a locksmith.
The trial, which started in 2021 but was repeatedly postponed due to Schuetz’s health, went on with him free.
Before the verdict, Stefan Waterkamp, his attorney, told AFP that if he were convicted guilty, he would file an appeal.
Years of evading punishment finally came to an end in 2018 when investigators from the Ludwigsburg-based Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes discovered Josef Schuetz’s identity in old records kept at the State Military Archive in Moscow.
At the end of the conflict, Russian forces brought these alleged “booty files” to Moscow.
The last trial for my friends, acquaintances, and loved ones who were murdered, in which the last guilty party will hopefully be found guilty, said Holocaust survivor and contemporary witness Leon Schwarzbaum, 100.
Josef Schuetz turned 101 a month later on his birthday. Leon Schwarzbaum passed away in March 2022.
When the top SS officers in the Reich Security Main Office were charged with the murder of hundreds of thousands of people but were let off the hook due to the passage of time and their “inability to stand trial,” Thomas Walther, a lawyer for several camp survivors and victims’ relatives, asked the court in May: “What can possibly be a fitting punishment?”
What possible punishment may be appropriate for a 101-year-old guy who is being held accountable for his actions 80 years after the crime was committed and who could have been brought to justice 70, 50, 30, or most probably 10 years earlier?
In the past few years, it has become customary for joint plaintiffs’ representatives to ask for a specific punishment without providing any specific numbers in their closing arguments.
But even if the offender were to change his mind and show some sorrow in his “last statement,” I must say that a sentence of less than five years in jail would be very challenging for my clients to understand.
The information supplied by Dr. Stefan Hoerdler, a historian and expert on concentration camps, was among the most damaging evidence against Schuetz.
This included a document from the Central Immigration Office (EWZ) dated 1941 that showed the entire 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 rank at the time are all stated on numerous official records, Schuetz has persisted in saying through his attorney that he never visited Sachsenhausen camp.
Documents from the Koblenz Federal Archives, the Stasi (East German secret service) archives, and the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Site Archives are among them.
From October 23, 1941, until February 18, 1945, Schuetz was a member of six distinct SS guard units, according to the documentation. At Sachsenhausen, he was promoted from the rank of Private to SS-Rottenführer (Corporal) during this time.
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 those 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 found guilty of participating in a mass murder at the age of 94, but they passed away before being put behind bars.
At the age of 93, Bruno Dey, a former SS guard, was found guilty in 2020 and handed a two-year suspended sentence.
Separately, a 96-year-old former Nazi death camp clerk is being tried for murder involvement in the northern German town of Itzehoe.
Irmgard Furchner, a typist known as the “Secretary of Evil,” is charged with helping to cover up the murder 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 crimes so many years after the events, such trials send an important message.
As the neo-fascist far right gains ground across Europe, he told AFP, “It is a question of reaffirming the political and moral responsibility of individuals in an authoritarian context (and in a criminal regime).”
‘The passage of time is no barrier to justice when it comes to the heinous crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators,’ Holocaust Educational Trust Chief Executive Karen Pollock CBE told MailOnline.
Every time one of these crimes is proven to have been committed, regardless of age, the Holocaust’s reality is made clear for all to see.
‘It has never been more crucial to bring offenders to justice, regardless of age, as the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes fade from living memory.