Germany sentences 101-year-old Nazi camp guard to 5 years in jail

Josef Schuetz was sentenced to five years in prison for working at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

A German court has handed a five-year jail sentence to a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, the oldest person so far to go on trial for complicity in war crimes during the Holocaust.

Josef Schuetz was found guilty of being an accessory to murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, presiding judge Udo Lechtermann said on Tuesday in the Neuruppin Regional Court.

In the trial, which opened in October last year, Schuetz said that he had worked as a farm laborer near Pasewalk in northeastern Germany during the period in question.

However, the court considered it proven that he worked at the camp on the outskirts of Berlin between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the German news agency DPA reported.