UTTERLY SICKENING: 101-year-old former WAFFEN SS Nazi death camp guard sentenced to 5 years in prison – My Comments
[This is so disgusting that 90 year old Germans are going to jail for a war that ended long before any of us were born. But the Jewish filth have no shame. Look here at this 101 year old White man! This is beyond madness. This is what happens to our people. Jewish HATRED knows no bounds for the Germans. This old man was Waffen SS, one of our FINEST Europeans. He is treated like total dirt. Unfortunately Germany is not a free state so Germans are under obligation to prosecute their own people even if they are innocent. I just laugh at the crap about him assisting in the killing of Jews with Zyklon B. What a load of garbage. That is like saying someone was using insect spray to murder people. It's like using the spray that you use to kill flies and mosquitos and to then claim you killed people with it. What a load of pure crap. All these claims of deaths – I would not even take any of this seriously. They have twisted history so much out of context. It's such garbage. Jan]
BERLIN (JTA) – The oldest former Nazi camp guard ever put on trial in Germany has been sentenced to five years in prison.
Josef Schütz, 101, was found guilty of complicity in the mass murder of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, welcomed the verdict in a statement.
“Even nearly eight decades since the end of the war, there are Nazi perpetrators living among us,” said Knobloch, who survived the war as a child in hiding with a German Christian family. “Even after such a long time they can be held accountable for their deeds: That is the important message that comes from today’s verdict.”
The presiding judge at the court in Brandenburg-Havel concluded that Schütz was “aware that prisoners were killed there. By your presence, you supported” these acts, he told the accused, according to a report by Euronews and AFP. “Anyone who wanted to flee the camp was shot. Thus, every camp guard actively participated in the killings.”
Whether Schütz will actually spend any time in prison remains to be seen. The minimum sentence for complicity in murder would have been three years, the reports said. Schütz’s lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp, had said in advance that he would likely appeal, putting off the start of a prison term to early 2023.
The trial was postponed several times due to Schütz’s ill health.
During 30 hearings, Schütz — who had been a non-commissioned officer of the Waffen-SS — continually denied the charges against him and never expressed any regret. His recollections of the past were sometimes contradictory, according to news reports.
Historical documents presented at the trial include his name, date and place of birth, and prove his assignment to the “Totenkopf” (“Skull”) division of the Waffen-SS. He was charged with having shot Soviet prisoners of war to death and of assisting in murders using Zyklon B poison gas. He was also accused of keeping prisoners in inhumane conditions.
Chief prosecutor Cyrill Klement had said last month that he had no doubt that the defendant “worked in Sachsenhausen” and embraced his role.
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the camp was opened in 1936 and initially held political prisoners. By the time it was liberated in 1945, some 200,000 had been held there, including Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, “asocials” — including Roma and Sinti — and Soviet civilians.
In all, some 100,000 were murdered there or died as a result of the terrible conditions.
Germany has prosecuted several accused accomplices to Nazi war crimes since the 2011 conviction in Munich of former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, who was found guilty as an accessory in the murders of nearly 30,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
That case set a precedent, in that being a guard at a death camp was sufficient to prove complicity in murder.
Last year, Germany began a trial of Irmgard Furchner, a 96-year-old woman who had been a secretary to the commander of the Stutthof Nazi death camp.
Attorney Thomas Walther, who represented civil plaintiffs in the Schütz case — including children of survivors — recently told German media that it was important to put even such elderly defendants on trial, “to set an example.”