The oldest person convicted of Holocaust-related offenses has passed away at the age of 102. Between 1942 and 1945, Josef Schütz was judged guilty in June of assisting in the murder of thousands of prisoners at Sachsenhausen near Berlin.
A five-year prison term was imposed, but he remained free pending the outcome of an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice.
Josef Schütz had always denied being a Nazi concentration camp SS officer.
He was judged guilty of assisting in the murders of 3,518 individuals. He was also complicit in the execution of Soviet captives of war and the use of Zyklon B gas against others.
During World War II, tens of thousands of individuals perished at Sachsenhausen from starvation, forced labor, medical experiments, and SS murder.
There were over two hundred thousand inmates, including political detainees, Jews, Roma, and Sinti (Gypsies).
During his trial, Josef Schütz expressed no regret, telling the German court, “I don’t know why I’m seated in the sin bin. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Despite his name and date of birth being discovered on documents belonging to an SS officer, he claimed he had not been at the camp and had instead worked as a farmhand.
“You willingly supported this mass extermination through your occupation,” the judge remarked at the time.
Germany has been attempting to bring former Nazi war criminals to justice following the landmark conviction of ex-SS officer John Demjanjuk in 2011.
This verdict prompted a search for still-living individuals.
Four years later, Oskar Groning, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” was sentenced to four years in prison. Similar to Schütz, he never served a day in prison due to a succession of appeals; he passed away in 2018.
In December, Irmgard Furchner, a 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary, became the first woman to be prosecuted for Nazi crimes in decades.
She was convicted of complicity in the murders of over 10,500 individuals at the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (modern-day Gdansk, Poland).
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