On Tuesday German prosecutors sought a five-year prison sentence for a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, the oldest person ever charged with being an accessory to murder during the Holocaust.
Josef Schütz has pleaded not guilty against all 3,518 counts against him for the murders at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, a town north of Berlin.
Prosecutor Cyrill Klement accused Shütz on Tuesday of “knowingly and willingly” participating in crimes at the camp, where the guard worked between 1942 and 1945 as a member of the SS, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing. Schütz “accepted the dehumanization of the victims,” news agency dpa reported.
Schütz told the court that he did not know the Sachsenhausen camp.
More than 200,000 people were held at Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945, with up to 100,000 of them dying of forced labor, starvation, and disease, as well as through medical experiments and executions by shooting, hanging, and gassing.
Schütz is charged, among other things, with the murder of prisoners “using the poisonous gas Zyklon B.”
A verdict is expected on June 2, but if convicted, Schütz is highly unlikely to be put behind bars due to his age.