a centenarian, the oldest defendant to be tried for Nazi crimes

A former guard, accused of “complicity in the death” of 3,518 inmates of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin, will appear on Thursday before a German court. The 100-year-old will thus become the oldest person to be tried in the country for alleged Nazi crimes.

Josef S., first corporal of the SS “Totenkopf” (dead man’s head) division, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, between 1942 and 1945, is suspected of having shot Soviet prisoners and “aiding and abetting death by gas”. He was 21 when the events started.

Josef S. “is not accused of having shot anyone in particular, but of having contributed to these acts for his guard work and having been aware that these murders were taking place in the fields, ”explained the spokesperson for the Neuruppin prosecutor’s office, Iris le Claire.

The accused faces at least three years in prison, but his grief would be symbolic given his advanced age. In August, a doctor declared him fit to appear, on condition that the 22 hearings scheduled until January were limited to a maximum of two hours.

“He is doing well and showing no signs of emerging dementia. You could tell he is mentally and spiritually very healthy», Declared Thomas Walther, lawyer of 11 of the 16 civil parties in this procedure, including seven survivors.

Little is known about his life: after being released from detention in 1947, he had a low-key existence as a locksmith in Brandenburg, near Berlin, according to the daily Bild. “So far the accused has remained silent”said his lawyer Stefan Waterkamp, ​​who did not say if he will plead not guilty.

“I hope he says ‘I was wrong, I am ashamed’ and that he will be sentenced,” said Antoine Grumbach, 79, represented by Walther. This Frenchman intends to attend the opening of the trial in memory of his father, resistant and assassinated in March 1944 in Sachsenhausen.

Showing pictures of his father, Jean Grumbach added: “The most important is talk about this area and the horrible methods invented to kill people“.

Other cases

Josef S.’s trial comes a week after the failed hearing against Irmgard Furchner, 96, a former secretary at another Nazi concentration camp. Her first hearing had to be postponed until October 19 after the old woman tried to run away and was fugitive for a few hours, just the day the trial started.

Eight other cases of former members of the SS are being assessed by different German prosecutors, according to the Central Office for the Clarification of the Crimes of National Socialism.

Over the past 10 years, Germany has tried and convicted four former SS men, extending to former camp guards and other executioners of Nazi orders the charge of complicity in murder, to illustrate the severity of his justice, yet judged late by the victims.

From its opening in 1936 until its liberation by the Soviets on April 22, 1945, around 200,000 prisoners passed through the Sachsenhausen camp, mainly political opponents, Jews and homosexuals.

Tens of thousands of them died of exhaustion from forced labor and cruel conditions of detention.

” Let justice be done “

Stephanie Bohra, researcher at Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum devoted to Nazi crimes, said that “these processes are particularly important for survivors and their descendants”.

“They wish for justice to be done and crimes to be solved“Bohra argued.

For his part, Guillaume Mouralis, research director at the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin, added: “The main function of this process is memory”.

“This is to confirm that a unified Germany is determined to get to the bottom of the Nazi past, in a context where, since the beginning of the 2000s, the memory of the genocide of the Jews has been placed at the center of national identity, ”he declared.

In July 2020, a court sentenced former Stutthof camp guard Bruno Dey, 93, to two years in prison.

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