Nazi concentration camp guard dies aged 102 before he could be sent to prison
The oldest Nazi to be prosecuted for crimes committed during the Holocaust has died at the age of 102.
Josef Schuetz was over 100 years old when he was convicted last year on more than 3,500 counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
Schuetz was sentenced to five years in prison last year in June but subsequently remained free pending appeal.
The centenarian denied any involvement working as a guard for the SS at the Sachsenhausen camp.
However, the state court in Neuruppin launched an investigation into the matter and found evidence he was a documented member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing based on the outskirts of Berlin between the years 1942 and 1945.
Schuetz denied working ever working at the camp during the trial and said: ‘I don’t know why I’m sitting here in the sin bin. I really had nothing to do with it.’
In response, prosecutors accused Schuetz of aiding and abetting the ‘execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942’, as well as murdering prisoners ‘using the poisonous gas Zyklon B’.
According to a legal precedent set in 2015, anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted in Germany for being an accessory to the murders committed there.
‘You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity,’ a judge told Shuetz at the time.
‘You watched deported people being cruelly tortured and murdered there every day for three years.’
Germany has been bringing numerous former Nazi war criminals to court after a landmark case in 2011, in which ex-SS guard John Demjanjuk was found guilty of war crimes.
His trial prompted a search for individuals who were still alive.
Four years later, Oskar Gröning was given a four-year jail term and later died in 2018.
Irmgard Furchner became the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades in December.
The 97-year-old was found guilty of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people at Stutthof camp where she was the concentration camp secretary,
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