In Germany, prosecutors have asked for a 5-year prison sentence for a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard.
At a hearing in the state of Brandenburg on Tuesday, it was argued that Josef Schuetz played a “willful and deliberate” role in the massacre of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in World War II.
In a conversation with Schuetz, the oldest prisoner on trial for a role in the war crimes committed in the Holocaust, Cyrill Klement, one of the prosecutors, said: “You accepted the inhuman treatment of the victims and you put up with it.”
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Schuetz’s camp, which was located in Oranienburg, north of the capital Berlin in 1942-1945, was part of the SS (Schutzstaffel; He allegedly served as a member of the German “Protection Battalion”).
Schuetz, on the other hand, maintained that he “did absolutely nothing” and claimed that he was not aware of what was happening in the camp.
Prosecutor Klement said he did not believe Schuetz’s allegations, adding: “I don’t believe this ‘We didn’t know anything’ story.”
He is accused of playing a role in the 1942 shooting death of Soviet Union prisoners of war and the murder of prisoners with poisonous Zyklon B gas.
A verdict on Schuetz, whose trial began in October, is expected in early June.
John Demjanjuk, a prison guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in southeastern Poland between 1942 and 1943, was sentenced to 5 years in prison in 2011 for his role in the murder of nearly 28,000 Jews, representing subsequent trials. Demjanjuk died the following year at the age of 92.
At the 2016 trial, Oskar Gröning, an accountant at Auschwitz, was sentenced to 4 years in prison, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at the same camp, was sentenced to 5 years.
In 2020, 93-year-old former SS guard Bruno Dey was sentenced to two years in suspended prison.
