BERLIN (Washington Insider Magazine) – A 101-year-old man who worked at the Nazis’ Sachsenhausen concentration camp in World War II was found guilty on over 3,500 charges of accessory to murder on Tuesday in Germany.
He received a 5-year jail term from the Neuruppin Regional Court.
The man, Josef S., who was named by the local press, had denied being an SS guard at the camp and encouraging the killing of several detainees.
The centenarian testified in the trial, which began in October, that he had served as a farm laborer close to Pasewalk in northeast Germany during the relevant time.
According to NBC NEWS, the court did find evidence that he was an active member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary arm who operated at the camp outside of Berlin from 1942 to 1945.
Records pertaining to an SS guard that included the man’s name, birth date, and birthplace, among other documents, served as the foundation for the prosecution’s case.
The prosecution requested a 5-year jail sentence, which was granted.
Acquittal was what the defendant’s attorney had requested. Stefan Waterkamp, the defense counsel, declared that he will appeal the judgment after the sentence was delivered.
Due to logistical constraints, the 101-year-home old’s town of Brandenburg/Havel served as the trial’s venue. The individual could only engage the trial for around 2 and a half hours each day because of his limited capacity to stand trial. Health issues and hospital visits caused frequent breaks in the process.
Due to his planned appeal and old age, Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Jerusalem, voiced fear that S. would only serve a fraction of the term or none at all.
Following Adolf Hitler’s decision to give the SS complete leadership over the Nazi concentration camp system, Sachsenhausen was created in 1936 as the first new location immediately north of Berlin. It was designed as a training centre and a model for the intricate network the Nazis constructed throughout Austria, Germany, and the conquered countries.
Between 1936 and 1945, over 200,000 individuals were detained there. Thousands and thousands of prisoners perished as a result of forced labor, illness, famine, and other factors, as well as due to SS extermination programmes that included gassing, hanging, and shooting.
Scholars believe that estimates of 40,000 to 50,000 are probably more accurate than higher estimates of some 100,000 fatalities.
In its early years, the majority of detainees were either political prisoners or criminal defendants, while some Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals were also detained there. In 1938, during the anti-Semitic pogrom known as Kristallnacht, the first sizable group of Jewish captives was sent there.
During the war, Sachsenhausen was enlarged to house more prisoners of war, including thousands of Soviets who were executed by shooting.
As in other facilities, Jewish inmates in Sachsenhausen received particularly severe treatment, and those who were still alive by 1942 were mostly sent to the Auschwitz execution camp.
The Soviets seized Sachsenhausen in April 1945, and they later transformed it into their own cruel concentration camp.
The decision on Tuesday is based on recent German legal precedent that says anybody who assisted in the operation of a Nazi concentration camp can be charged with being an accomplice to murder.
In a second instance, a 96-year-old woman was put on trial in the northern German district of Itzehoe in late September. More than 11,000 charges of accessory to murder have been brought against the woman, who is said to have served as the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp’s secretary during the war.
Image via NBC News
