Never has such an old defendant been tried for his participation in the atrocities committed by the Third Reich. The former guard of the Sachsenhausen camp, near Berlin, was sentenced on Wednesday to five years in prison.
From our correspondent in Berlin,
” Anyone wanting to flee the camp was shot. Every guard participated in these murders. The president of the court reminded us: over the past ten years, German case law has evolved considerably. In the past, proof of direct participation in the murders committed in Nazi concentration camps was necessary.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when more important leaders of the concentration camp system were tried, camp guards participated in the trials only as witnesses. Since 2011 and the judgment against Ivan “John” Demjankjuk, a Ukrainian who then immigrated to the United States, it is enough to have been one of the cogs in the Nazi extermination machine to be convicted.
Records contradict the accused
Like Josef Schütz, 101 years old today. The former Waffen-SS non-commissioned officer was found guilty of complicity in the murder of 3,500 prisoners when he worked at the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945. The man denied being there during the war and claimed to have worked as an agricultural labourer. But the archives have proven beyond any possible doubt that the former Waffen-SS officer had indeed been assigned to this camp during the war.
Sachsenhausen, opened in 1936, was a “pilot” camp that played an important role in the Nazi criminal machine. Some 200,000 people were interned there until the end of the war. Several tens of thousands of them were shot there, gassed or died in horrible circumstances, such as cruel “medical” experiments on prisoners.
Duty of memory
One of these prisoners was the Frenchman Jean Grumbach, who was delivered by the Vichy police to the Germans and deported to Sachsenhausen, from where he never returned. His son, Antoine, now 80, was a civil party to the trial. After the verdict, he said: I will never forgive. No one was forced to become a member of the SS, everyone is responsible for their actions. His daughter Lily, 23, added: For my generation and for those who will follow, it is very important that after the disappearance of the last witnesses, the memory of this time is not erased. »
The lawyer for the civil party, Thomas Walther, who worked for a long time as a judge in a prosecutor’s office specializing in the tracking of Nazi war criminals, does not see in this trial only the prosecution of now distant crimes: ” Sachsenhausen can reproduce today all over the world. »
The president of the German community, Josef Schuster, welcomed the judgment: “ The thousands of people who worked in the concentration camps allowed this machinery of death to work. They were part of this system and therefore must answer for their actions. This judgment is important for Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as it confirms their confidence in the rule of law. The president of the Wiesenthal Center in Israel, Efraim Zuroff, also endorsed the harsh verdict: He got what he deserved. »
The sentence of Josef Schütz to five years in prison is not yet final. The accused, who expressed no regret during the hearings and remained unresponsive to the announcement of the verdict, will appeal to the Court of Cassation. Even if he is dismissed, it is unlikely given his age and state of health that the former camp guard will end his days in prison.