Man convicted of aiding and abetting the killing of prisoners at Nazi concentration camp

The man had been charged in 2021 with aiding and abetting the killing of prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, from January 1942 to February 1945, according to the prosecutor's office in Neuruppin in the northeastern state of Brandenburg.

He was sentenced by the Neuruppin Regional Court on Tuesday, a court spokeswoman told CNN.com.

Christoph Heubner, the International Auschwitz Committee's chief executive, told CNN on Tuesday that the verdict is a late compensation for relatives and a very important sign from Germany.

Heubner, who followed the trial, criticized the number of years it had taken the German courts to press charges. He said that the wound of the relatives can now be taken care of.

According to Heubner, the convicted man had always denied being active in the concentration camp. Around 100,000 prisoners are thought to have died at the Sachsenhausen camp. The ruling was acknowledged by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The verdict is to be welcomed, even if the defendant won't serve the full prison term due to his advanced age, according to Josef Schuster, the council's president. The murder machinery was kept running by thousands of people who worked in the concentration camps. Schuster said that they should also take responsibility for the system because they were part of the system. The defendant has denied his activities until the end of his life and has shown no remorse. A Holocaust Remembrance Day event was canceled due to low registration. So hundreds showed up on Zoom to hear the survivor's story. The man's name has not been made public, in accordance with Germany's privacy laws. In 1942, the charges included involvement in the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war, aiding and abetting of the murder of prisoners through the use of poison gas, as well as other shootings and the killing of prisoners by creating and maintaining hostile conditions in the camp of Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen was built by prisoners and opened in 1936. Around 100,000 of the roughly 200,000 prisoners who passed through it are thought to have died there. During World War II, the camp's inmate population fluctuated between 11,000 and 48,000 people. During World War II, an estimated 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps. Hunderts of thousands of Roma people, political opponents, homosexuals, and people with physical or learning disabilities were killed.