Josef Schuetz, a former Nazi concentration-camp guard now aged 101, was sentenced to prison for five years in Germany on Tuesday after being convicted of 3,518 counts of accessory to murder. The centenarian had denied working as an SS guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin between 1942 and 1945.
He argued that he was working on a farm at the time—but prosecutors used documents about an SS guard with the defendant’s name, date, and birthplace to bring him to justice after 80 years. Precise numbers are unknown, but historians estimate that between 40,000 and 100,000 people died at Sachsenhausen from starvation, forced labor, medical experiments, and SS mass killings involving shootings and gassing. “You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity,” Judge Udo Lechtermann said at the trial. Read more.