Centennial Nazi guard tried for 3,518 dead in concentration camp | Josef Schutz is the longest-serving accused responsible for the extermination

Germany advances in legal proceedings against those responsible for the Nazi extermination machine, 76 years after the end of World War II. In the context of the trials against second-rank criminals, a century-old former guard of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp He denied having been an accomplice in the murder of 3,518 prisoners.

“I did absolutely nothing. I am innocent, “said the accused, Josef Schutz., During the second hearing of the process opened on Thursday in the German town of Brandenburg an der Havel, near Berlin. Schutz this week became the longest-serving defendant in responsibility for alleged crimes during Nazism.

The prosecution indicates that he was complicit in the deaths of these 3,518 prisoners, which occurred while he was serving in this camp, between 1942 and 1945. According to the prosecution, he “knowingly and willfully” participated in these murders.

More specifically, it is emphasized that the accused was accomplice in the assassination of Soviet prisoners of war, as well as the murder in gas chambers of other prisoners of this former Nazi concentration camp.

About 200,000 prisoners passed through the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, including At least 20,000 were killed.

Why are accomplices on trial now

The process is part of the so-called late trials for complicity in Nazi crimes. This series of cases was opened following the conviction handed down in 2011 against the Ukrainian John Demjanjuk, sentenced to five years for complicity in the killings at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.

It was a complex trial, against which the accused – who lived in exile in the United States – exhausted all legal resources in an attempt to prevent his extradition.

Demjanjuk attended his trial on a stretcher, never spoke of the charges against him and died months after hearing a conviction at a nursing home.

But his sentence established jurisprudence. Other processes took place under similar conditions, hampered by interruptions and allegations of the accused’s ill health.

For representatives of the prosecution and victims’ groups, the meaning of these trials is not to subject the elderly to the torture of a trial, but to defend the fundamental principle that the crimes of Nazism do not prescribe.

The other events to come

The trial against Irmgard is due to start on October 19

Furchner, 96, former secretary of the Nazi camp in Stutthof, northern Germany, accused of being an accomplice in 11,000 murders or attempted murders.

The proceedings should have been opened a week ago, but the defendant made an escape attempt which delayed the legal proceedings.

On the same day, she took a taxi from the retirement home where she lives to a Hamburg metro station, where she was located and detained a few hours later.

The old woman is accused of complicity in these deaths because of her work as an administrative employee in this area, where she served between June 1943 and April 1945.