For his role in the killing of thousands of prisoners at Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near Berlin, a former Nazi guard known as Josef S was given a five-year prison sentence.
He had consistently denied working as an SS guard at the camp and was the oldest Nazi criminal to ever go on trial in a German court.
He was falsely accused of aiding and abetting the killing of 5,181 persons.
He was complicit in the use of Zyklon B gas against Soviet captured soldiers and the death of others.
The defence has asked for his release and plans to appeal the imprisonment decision.
Thousands of people died at Sachsenhausen during WWII as a result of malnutrition, forced labour, medical trials, and SS murder. Inmates there totalled more than 1000, notably political prisoners, Jews, Roma, and Sinti ( wanderers).
“I’m not sure why I’m sitting in the sin caddy. I had absolutely nothing to do with anything “Josef S declared this in his closing speech at the judgement in Brandenburg a der Havel.
He was informed by Judge Udo Lechtermann that despite his denials, the court had established that he had visited the concentration camp three times between 1942 and 1945..” You willingly supported this mass decimation through your occupation,” he said.
Putting Nazi camp guards on trial only came possible in 2011, when-SS guard John Demjanjuk was set up shamefaced. That verdict urged a hunt for individualities who were still alive.
Four times latterly, the so-called” chronicler of Auschwitz”, Oskar Gröning, was given a jail term. And a 97- time-old former attention camp clerk is presently on trial in northern Germany.
Josef S isn’t completely linked in Germany because of sequestration conventions. He said he hadn’t been at the camp and had been working somewhere else, despite the fact that his name and birth information was listed on the paperwork of an SS guard.