Germany tries 100-year-old former Nazi guard accused of being an accessory to 3,518 deaths

a German The 100-year-old, who was a concentration camp guard in the 1940s, became the oldest person tried for alleged Nazi crimes on Thursday, but will not speak out in court about the alleged atrocities committed.

Josef Schutz, formerly of the first division “Totenkopf” (dead man’s head) of the SS, is accused of “complicity in the death” of 3,518 prisoners in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.

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The trial began Thursday morning in Brandenburg an der Havel, east of Germany, in the presence of the accused, who needs a walker to walk and appears at liberty. The old man hid his face from the press with the help of a blue folder.

His lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp, ​​explained that his client “will not express himself” about the facts that are accused of him.

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“The accused will not speak, he will only give information about his personal situation”, said the lawyer.

The accused answered in a clear voice to the president of the court when he asked his name and personal situation. He said that he lived in the Brandenburg region near Berlin, that he had been a widower since 1986, and proudly explained that he was going to “celebrate his 101st birthday on November 16”.

The hearing, the first of 22, lasted an hour due to the advanced age of the accused, who tires easily. The session was devoted to reading a part of the 134 pages of the indictment by the prosecutor, Cyrill Klement.

The defendant Josef Schutz hides his face behind a folder when he arrives for his trial in Brandenburg an der Havel, in northeastern Germany, on October 7, 2021. (TOBIAS SCHWARZ / AFP).

Josef Schutz was 21 years old when the facts before him began.

Since it was opened in 1936 until its liberation by the Soviets on April 22, 1945, some 200,000 prisoners passed through the Sachsenhausen camp, mainly political opponents, Jews and homosexuals.

Tens of thousands of them died of exhaustion due to forced labor and cruel conditions of detention.

“Something can happen”

The defendant’s desire not to pronounce on the facts, which implies a refusal to ask for forgiveness, caused the displeasure of those present.

“I am very affected. Almost 80 years ago I lost my father and this guy is a bad man, a disgusting man who refuses to accept the possibility of being guilty ”, Antoine Grumbach, 79, whose father, a French resistance, was assassinated in Sachsenhausen in 1944, told AFP.

Thomas Walther, a lawyer for 11 of the 16 civil parties to this trial, was more optimistic: “For the complainants, the fact that he has appeared at the trial is already a good thing (…) Something can happen, maybe a A man thus comes to the conclusion that before dying he wants to explain himself about his past ”, he confided.

The trial comes a week after the failed hearing against Irmgard Furchner, 96, a former secretary of another Nazi concentration camp.

His first session had to be postponed to October 19 after the old woman tried to escape, just the day the trial began.

In the last 10 years, Germany has tried and sentenced four former members of the SS, extending the accusation of complicity to murder to camp guards and other executors of Nazi orders, to illustrate the severity of its justice, considered however late for the victims.

Josef Schutz “He is not accused of shooting at someone in particular, but of having contributed to these acts through his guard duty and of having been aware that these murders were taking place in the fields,” explained the spokeswoman for the Neuruppin prosecutor’s office, Iris. Claire

The accused faces a minimum of three years in prison, but his sentence would be symbolic given his advanced age.

For Stephanie Bohra, researcher at the Berlin museum Topography of Terror, dedicated to Nazi crimes, “these processes are particularly important for the survivors and their descendants. They want justice to be done and crimes to be solved. “

In July 2020, a court sentenced a former Stutthof camp guard, Bruno Dey, 93, to two years in suspended prison. Eight other cases of former SS members are evaluated by different German prosecutors.

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