102-year-old convicted former Nazi camp guard dies while awaiting appeal
Josef Schuetz denied working at Sachsenhausen but was found by a German court to have served there as a member of the SS
BERLIN — A 102-year-old man who was convicted last year on more than 3,500 counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II has died, German news agency dpa reported Wednesday.
Josef Schuetz was sentenced to five years in prison last June but remained free pending appeal.
He had denied working as an SS guard at the Sachsenhausen camp. But the state court in Neuruppin concluded that documents with his name, date and place of birth showed he had in fact been an enlisted member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing stationed at the camp on the outskirts of Berlin between 1942 and 1945.
Tens of thousands of inmates — including Jews, political prisoners and captured Soviet soldiers — died at the Sachsenhausen camp from starvation, disease, forced labor and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic executions carried out by the SS.
Delivering the court’s verdict, presiding Judge Udo Lechtermann said the defendant had assisted the murderous system established by the Nazis. According to a legal precedent set in 2015, anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted in Germany for being an accessory to the murders committed there.
“You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity,” Lechtermann said at the time. “You watched deported people being cruelly tortured and murdered there every day for three years.”
The verdict made Schuetz the oldest person ever to be convicted of complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.
It had always seemed unlikely that Schuetz would ever go to jail as he remained free while awaiting the outcome of an appeal.
Schuetz had expressed no regret during his trial and pleaded innocent, saying he did “absolutely nothing”.
After the war, Schuetz was transferred to a prison camp in Russia before returning to Germany, where he worked as a farmer and a locksmith.