A German court on Tuesday handed a five-year jail sentence to a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, the oldest person so far to go on trial for complicity in war crimes during the Holocaust.
Josef Schuetz was found guilty of being an accessory to murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, presiding judge Udo Lechtermann said.
But despite his conviction, he is highly unlikely to be put behind bars to serve the five-year prison sentence, given his age.
The Lithuanian-born pensioner, who now lives in Brandenburg state, had pleaded innocent, saying he did ‘absolutely nothing’ and was not aware of the gruesome crimes being carried out at the camp.
‘I don’t know why I am here,’ Schuetz, who is the oldest person so far to face trial over Nazi war crimes committed during the Holocaust, said at the close of his trial on Monday.
But prosecutors told the Neuruppin Regional Court, which is being held in a prison sports hall in Brandenburg an der Havel, that Schueltz ‘knowingly and willingly’ participated in the murders of 3,518 prisoners at the camp and called for him to be punished with five years behind bars.
More than 200,000 people, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people, were detained at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1936 and 1945.

Josef Schuetz was found guilty of being an accessory to murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, presiding judge Udo Lechtermann said

Prosecutors say Schuetz ‘knowingly and willingly’ participated in the crimes as a guard at the camp and are seeking to punish him with five years behind bars. Pictured: Holocaust survivor Leon Schwarzbaum holds a picture in the courtroom during the trial at the Landgericht Neuruppin court in in October last year

Schuetz said he did ‘absolutely nothing’ and was not aware of the gruesome crimes being carried out at the camp. Pictured: Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen in December 1938
Tens of thousands of inmates died from forced labour, murder, medical experiments, hunger or disease before the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.
Prosecutors said Schuetz had aided and abetted the ‘execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942’ and the murder of prisoners ‘using the poisonous gas Zyklon B’.
He was 21 years old at the time.
The Soviet prisoners of war were killed in a gruesome ‘neck shot’ facility.
Here SS guards donned white medical overalls and pretended to prisoners they were doctors concerned with their well-being. They then lined up prisoners against a wall and measured them.
Meanwhile in a neighbouring room, other armed SS guards used the measurements as a setting for their guns. They would open a slit in the wall and fire into the prisoner’s neck.
Josef Schuetz managed to escape justice for 80 years.
During the trial, Schuetz made several inconsistent statements about his past, complaining that his head was getting ‘mixed up’.
At one point, the centenarian said he had worked as an agricultural labourer in Germany for most of World War II, a claim contradicted by several historical documents bearing his name, date and place of birth.
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.
Schuetz remained at liberty during the trial, which began in 2021 but has been delayed several times because of his health.
His lawyer Stefan Waterkamp told AFP ahead of the verdict that if found guilty, he would appeal.
Schuetz evaded justice for decades, but his luck ran out in 2018 when Investigators from the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg came across the name of Josef Schuetz in the old files in the State Military Archive in Moscow.
These so-called ‘booty files’ were taken by Russian soldiers to Moscow at the end of the war.

The 101-year-old former security guard of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp appears in the courtroom before his trial verdict at the Landgericht Neuruppin court, in Brandenburg, on Tuesday
Meanwhile Holocaust survivor and contemporary witness Leon Schwarzbaum, 100, told press this was ‘the last trial for my friends, acquaintances and loved ones who were murdered, in which the last guilty party will hopefully be convicted.’
A month later, Josef Schuetz celebrated his 101st birthday. By March 2022, Leon Schwarzbaum had passed away.
Thomas Walther, a lawyer representing several camp survivors and victims’ relatives, told the court in May: ‘What can possibly be a fitting punishment, when the leading SS officers in the Reich Security Main Office were indicted for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, but were able to get off scot-free, because of the lapse in time and their “incapacity to stand trial”?’
‘What can possibly be a fitting punishment for a 101 year old man who is having to face up to his own responsibility after 80 years after committing the crime, and who could have been taken to court 70, or 50, or 30, or most definitely 10 years ago?’
‘Over the past years it has been general practice that, in their closing remarks, the representatives of joint plaintiffs refrain from stating any figures when calling for a particular sentence.
‘Nevertheless, I must state here that a sentence of less than five years imprisonment would be extremely difficult for my clients to comprehend, even if the defendant were to change his mind and express some kind of remorse in his “final statement”.
Some of the most damning evidence against Schuetz included the material presented by concentration camp expert, historian Dr. Stefan Hoerdler.

‘All the cruellest methods were invented there and then exported,’ said Antoine Grumbach, 80, whose father died in Sachsenhausen. Pictured: The entrance tower of the former concentration camp
This included a document dated 1941 from the Central Immigration Office (EWZ), showing the entire Schuetz family from Lithuania.
The document showed his father, Wilhelm, who was born in 1862, his mother, Maria who was born in 1886, alongside Josef Schuetz himself and six of his seven siblings born between 1911 and 1927.
Here a date of birth and other personal details are listed, and passport photos.
Under this was a picture of Josef Schuetz, the exact same photo which appears on an SS document.
Through his lawyer, Schuetz has continued to claim that he was never at Sachsenhausen camp, although his name, his date of birth, and military rank at the time are all listed on a wide range of official documents.
These include documents from the Koblenz Federal Archives, the Stasi (East German secret service) archives, and the archives at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial site.
The material shows that Schuetz served in six different companies of SS guards from October 23, 1941 to February 18, 1945 and that during this period, he was promoted from the rank of Private to SS-Rottenführer (Corporal) at Sachsenhausen.

‘I don’t know why I am here,’ Schuetz insisted to the court. Pictured: A roll call in front of the camp gate of Sachsenhausen. In the foreground on the tower a machine gun pointed at the prisoners
More than seven decades after World War II, German prosecutors are racing to bring the last surviving Nazi perpetrators to justice.
The 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, on the basis that he served as part of Hitler’s killing machine, set a legal precedent and paved the way for several of these twilight justice cases.
Since then, courts have handed down several guilty verdicts on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual accused.
Among those brought to late justice were Oskar Groening, an accountant at Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz.
Both were convicted at the age of 94 of complicity in mass murder but died before they could be imprisoned.
A former SS guard, Bruno Dey, was found guilty at the age of 93 in 2020 and was given a two-year suspended sentence.
Separately, in the northern German town of Itzehoe, a 96-year-old former secretary in a Nazi death camp is on trial for complicity in murder.
She dramatically fled before the start of her trial but was caught several hours later.
While some have questioned the wisdom of chasing convictions related to Nazi crimes so long after the events, Guillaume Mouralis, a research professor at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), said such trials send an important signal.
‘It is a question of reaffirming the political and moral responsibility of individuals in an authoritarian context (and in a criminal regime) at a time when the neo-fascist far right is strengthening everywhere in Europe,’ he told AFP.