“I am innocent”: the 100-year-old former Nazi guard accused of being an accessory to 3,518 deaths speaks

With 100 years old, Josef Schutz is facing a trial against him for having been an accessory to thousands of crimes nazis in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His lawyer said the defendant was not going to speak, but —with a light tone— the oldest German tried for Nazi crimes defended this Friday his “innocence”.

In his second hearing before the judge, this former guard of the camp located near Berlin testified firmly. “I don’t know anything about it.”, said Schutz, who, despite having been a former former of the “Totenkopf” (dead man’s head) division of the SS, defended being “innocent”.

“Everything appears shattered in my head“Said Schutz, who regretted being”solo”In the dock of the court of Brandenburg an der Havel, in the east of Germany, where he must appear until the beginning of January.

These statements were quickly interrupted by his lawyer, who the day before had explained that the accused would not speak about the period of Nazi Germany. “We had agreed with the defense on this procedure.or ”, protested the lawyer.

Schutz is accused of “complicity” at “murder”Of 3,518 prisoners in the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945.

This second audience was dedicated to his life before and after the Second World War.

Youth on a farm

After arriving alone in court, walking with a walker but with a relatively safe step, the defendant spoke with precision about his past, but without evoking his activities in the Nazi camp.

Specifically, he recalled his work as a teenager on a family farm in Lithuania with his seven brothers and sisters, and his subsequent conscription into the army in 1938.

After the war, he was transferred to a prison camp in Russia and later settled in Germany, in Brandenburg, a region next to Berlin. He worked as a farmer and later as a locksmith.

The accused, with white hair, average height and glasses, recalled his anniversaries celebrated together with his daughters and grandchildren or the admiration his wife felt for him. “She constantly told me: ‘There is no other man like you in the world’ He explained.

However, he generated some astonishment in the room when he assured that he did not “learn to speak German until [su] Return of Russia ”, in 1947.

For his part, 84-year-old Christoffel Heijer, who appeared as a witness after losing his father in the field, pointed a finger at the accused and said excitedly: “I can understand that, out of fear or retaliation, you will not desert. But how could you sleep in peace for so long?”.

The trial will be held in 20 two-hour hearings due to the age of the accused.

Schutz was 21 years old when he began his tasks in the concentration camp. He is suspected of having shot Soviet prisoners, “of aid and complicity in systematic murders ”with poison gas Zyklon B and of“ the detention of prisoners in hostile conditions”.

Holocaust survivors among civilian parties

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.

Several survivors from Sachsenhausen came forward as a popular indictment.

Some did not hide their disappointment, this Friday, at the defendant’s silence.

“Pretend you don’t know anything even though you remember everything perfectly and in detail!”Angrily declared Antoine Grumbach, a 79-year-old Frenchman whose father participated in the resistance and was assassinated in Sachsenhausen.

“He is not senile! It is pure manipulation of the lawyer, who has opted for this strategy of silence”, He added, at the end of the hearing.

After a past marked by little judicial pressure on the perpetrators of Nazi crimes, Germany tried and sentenced four former members of the SS in the last ten years, extending to the camp guards and other executors of Nazi orders the accusation of complicity for murder.

In recent years, four former SS officers have been convicted on these charges.