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Thursday, February 13, 2025
WorldJosef Schütz, Nazi camp guard, dies at 102

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Josef Schütz, Nazi camp guard, dies at 102

The oldest individual to have been found guilty of crimes during the Holocaust has passed away at age 102.

Josef Schütz was found guilty in June of helping to murder thousands of prisoners between 1942 and 1945 at Sachsenhausen near Berlin.

While he awaited the conclusion of an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice, he served the entirety of a five-year prison term without being locked up.

Schütz had consistently denied working as an SS guard in the detention camp.

He was judged responsible for the 3,518 killings that took place. Additionally, he participated in the shooting of Soviet POWs and the use of Zyklon B gas to kill others.

Tens of thousands of people died at Sachsenhausen during World War II from starvation, forced labour, medical experiments and murder by the SS.

More than 200,000 people were imprisoned there, including political prisoners as well as Jews, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies).

Schütz expressed no regret during his trial, telling the German court: “I don’t know why I’m sitting here in the sin bin. I really had nothing to do with it.”

Despite his name and birth details found on documents of an SS guard, he claimed he had not been at the camp and worked instead as a farm labourer.

“You willingly supported this mass extermination through your occupation,” the judge said at the time.

Germany has been trying to bring former Nazi war criminals to court after a landmark case in 2011, in which ex-SS guard John Demjanjuk was found guilty.

That verdict prompted a search for individuals who were still alive.

Four years later, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, Oskar Gröning, was given a four-year jail term. Like Schütz, he never spent a day in jail due to a series of appeals – and he died in 2018.

And a 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary, Irmgard Furchner, became the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades in December. She was found guilty of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people at Stutthof camp, near the city of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk in Poland).

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