Germany Convicted A 101-Year-Old Concentration Camp Warden

101-year-old Josef Schütz was sentenced to five years in prison for complicity in the murder of thousands of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen. Until the last moment of the trial, which took place in the town of Neuruppin, the defendant said to be innocent, claiming he was never a supervisor.

The old man was found guilty of being an accomplice in the fact that, as a former Nazi warden, he sent 3,518 prisoners to his death. According to the indictment, he worked in the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945. The trial with Josef Schütz began last year, but he had to be suspended several times due to the defendant's persistent health problems.

A 101-year old German man was sentenced to 5 years in prison for helping murder at least 3,518 people during the Holocaust.

Josef Schuetz was a guard at a Nazi death camp that imprisoned over 200,000 Jews, Roma, gay people and others. He is unlikely to serve time due to his age. pic.twitter.com/vkpjcQSRYK

— AJ+ (@ajplus) June 28, 2022

The German prosecutor's office wants to gradually bring all still living collaborators of the Nazi regime to justice. A legal precedent, on the basis of which they have the right to pass sentences even more than 75 years since the end of World War II, was set in 2011 by the conviction of former warden John Demjanjuk.

Since then, several war criminals have been convicted in Germany, including Auschwitz accountant Oskar Gröning and former SS officer Reinhold Hanning, who heard his guilty verdict of aiding and abetting massacres at the age of 94.