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 be on trial for complicity in war crimes during the Holocaust.
Josef Schtz was found guilty on Tuesday 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.
Sch tz had said he did absolutely nothing and was not aware of the crimes carried out at the camp. I don't know why I am here, he said at the close of the trial on Monday.
The prosecutors said he knowingly and willingly participated in the murders of 3,518 prisoners at the camp.
Between 1936 and 1945, more than 200,000 people, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people, were detained in Sachsenhausen. Hundreds of inmates were murdered or died from forced labour, medical experiments, hunger or disease before the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and MuseumSachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.
Prosecutors said Sch tz aided and abetted the execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942 and the murder of prisoners using the poison gas Zyklon B He was 21 years old at the time.
Sch tz made several inconsistent statements about his past in the trial, complaining that he was getting mixed up. He said he worked as an agricultural labourer in Germany for most of the war, a claim that was contradicted by several historical documents bearing his name, date and place of birth.
He is very unlikely to be put behind bars because of his age, despite his conviction and sentence. His lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp, said before the verdict that if found guilty he would appeal.