Schütz’s name and date of birth were found in SS documents
Former Nazi concentration camp warden Josef Schütz, who was imprisoned at a record age of 102 and sentenced last year, has died in Germany. However, he was not in jail as he was waiting for his appeal to be heard.
Schütz himself denied to the end that he was an SS member and a camp warden.
However, in June of last year, the court sentenced him to five years in prison, accepting as proven that in 1942-1945 he served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin and assisted in the murder of 3,500 people.
Schütz appealed the sentence to the Federal Court of Germany.
During the Second World War, the Nazis sent more than 200,000 people to Sachsenhausen – political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Jews and Roma.
Tens of thousands of them die. Some of them died of starvation and hard labor, others were killed in medical experiments, others were killed in gas chambers, and still others were simply shot.
Schütz’s name and date of birth were found in SS documents, but he still claimed that he was not an SS member and did not serve in the camp guard, but worked on a farm during the war.
“I don’t know why I’m sitting here in the dock. I have nothing to do with all this,” Schütz told the court.
However, the court concluded that Schütz did indeed serve in the concentration camp and knowingly and voluntarily participated in the mass extermination of people.
Germany has stepped up its hunt for Nazi criminals following the high-profile case of Ivan (John) Demjanjuk, who was extradited to Germany from the US and in 2011 was sentenced to five years in prison as a former warden at the Sobibor and Flossenburg concentration camps and an accomplice in the mass murders of prisoners .
Demjanjuk, who was 91 at the time of the sentencing, also did not go to jail because he appealed and died in a nursing home before the decision was made, back in 2012.
Four years after Demjanjuk’s trial, the “Auschwitz accountant” Oskar Gröning was sentenced to four years in prison. Thanks to an appeal, he also stayed out of prison until his death in 2018.
In December, the first woman accused of complicity in Nazi crimes in decades, 97-year-old Irmgard Fürchner, who served as secretary to the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), was sentenced to two years in prison with a suspended sentence.
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Photo by Hamit Ferhat:
