Josef Schütz, a former Nazi concentration camp guard sentenced to prison in 2022, died at the age of 102, AFP learned on Wednesday from a source familiar with the matter.
• Read also: At 101, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison for Nazi crimes
This former Waffen SS non-commissioned officer was convicted in June 2022 of “complicity” in the murder of at least 3,500 prisoners when he operated between 1942 and 1945 in the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin.
Schütz was sentenced by the court in Brandenburg an der Havel (East) to five years in prison, becoming the oldest person to be convicted of complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.
His lawyer immediately announced that he would go to cassation, postponing the application of this sentence to at least this year, which seemed hypothetical given Mr. Schütz’s fragile state of health.
Never during the thirty hearings he had expressed the slightest regret, unfolding several stories from his past.
After the war, Schütz had been transferred to a prison camp in Russia and then settled in Brandenburg (region around Berlin), working as a peasant and then a locksmith, without ever being worried.
Between its opening in 1936 and its liberation by the Soviets on April 22, 1945, the Sachsenhausen camp saw some 200,000 prisoners, mainly political opponents, Jews and homosexuals.
Tens of thousands of them perished, victims mainly of exhaustion due to forced labor and cruel conditions of detention.
Yet “simple” camp guard, Mr. Schütz was sentenced to a heavy sentence compared to other recent decisions, illustrating the increased severity, although considered very late by the victims, of German justice.
In July 2020, a court imposed a two-year suspended prison sentence on a former Stutthof camp guard, Bruno Dey, 93. In December 2022, a 97-year-old ex-secretary of this camp was given a two-year suspended prison sentence.
The most emblematic case was the five-year prison sentence of former Sobibor extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011. He appealed and died a year later without being imprisoned.