101-year-old Nazi concentration camp guard gets 5 years in prison

The 9-month trial of a former guard at the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen has ended.

The 101-year-old man was sentenced to five years in prison. Justice was done after 77 years. Josef Schutz became the oldest Nazi criminal ever tried for complicity in war atrocities during World War II.

This difficult process lasted nine months. During it, the pensioner said that he “does not know why he is here” – he never served as a security guard, and in the period 1942-1945 he worked “hard” as a laborer on a farm located in northeastern Germany.

The prosecutor’s office, however, provided indisputable evidence of Schutz’s “conscious and voluntary” involvement in the murders of 3,518 prisoners and demanded a five-year prison term. At his age, that means spending the last days of his life in a prison cell.

According to the Sachsenhausen Museum, tens of thousands of prisoners died from murder, forced overwork, medical experiments, disease, starvation before the camp was liberated by Soviet troops.

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