On Tuesday a court in Brandenburg, Germany, sentenced Josef Schütz, a former member of the Nazi division SS Totenkopf, to five years in prison for “complicity in murders during his service in Sachsenhausen campbetween 1942 and 1945. Schütz, 101, is the oldest of the Nazis ever tried, one of the last.

Udo Lechtermann, president of the court, stated in the sentence: “Mr. Schütz, you worked for about three years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where you were complicit in a mass murder. He knew that prisoners were being murdered. With his presence he supported those acts. Anyone who tried to escape from the camp was shot. All the guards (like Schütz) actively participated in these murders. “

Who is Schutz?

The former Nazi guard, now condemned, told several contradictory stories, justifying himself in that “everything is undone in my head”. In his latest version of him he claimed that he left Lithuania at the beginning of World War II to go to Germany to work on a farm during the war. He said he was planting trees, that never dressed as a military man and that he was wearing a blue workman’s uniform.

The latter version clashes with documents available during the trial, which ensure that from late 1942 to early 1945 it was member of the SS Totenkopf division (“dead head”).

Schütz did not lay down his arms of his own free will, but he was captured by the Red Army and sent as a prisoner of war to Russia. The Russians didn’t know what is known now, so participated in the executions of Soviet prisoners.

After being released, he returned to Germany and settled in the Brandenburg region near Berlin. He was a farmer and then worked as a blacksmith for decades. he was never arrestednor investigated or questioned, like the vast majority of former Nazi SS members.

The Sachsenhausen camp

Sachsenhausen was a minor camp compared to large-scale killing machines that were others such as Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or Treblinka.

The camp was opened in 1936 and was liberated on April 22, 1945 by Soviet soldiers. For him more than 200,000 prisoners passed: Jews, homosexuals and political opponents of Nazism. Tens of thousands of people have died, most of them due to poor living conditions and forced labor.

Schutz never admitted the facts and therefore he never apologized for them. During the trial he even said it he did not understand why he was being judged. His age and poor health mean that he is unlikely to be put in jail and allowed to live what’s left of him under house arrest. The court he considered him complicit in the deaths of 3,518 people.

After decades of dragging, when there were thousands of criminals to try, German justice has put together its acts in the last decade, when there was no longer any high position but non-commissioned officers like Schütz or low-ranking soldiers.

In 1969 the highest German court held that the mere presence of a person as a security guard in a death camp or even next to the gas chambers it was not enough to condemn it.

In those years, of the 7,000 people indicted for working for the Nazi regime’s Central Security Bureau, just 400 were investigated, 16 were prosecuted and three were condemned.

Brussels, special

ap