In Germany, a 101-year-old former concentration camp guard was sentenced to five years in prison. He is the oldest person to be tried for crimes committed during the Holocaust.

In Germany, a court sentenced 101-year-old Josef Schutz to five years in prison. A Brandenburg court found him guilty of complicity in the murders that took place from 1942 to 1945, when the 21-year-old Schutz worked as a guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg.

According to DW, Schutz became the oldest person to stand trial for crimes committed during the Holocaust and was found guilty.

The prosecutor's office accused Schutz of involvement in the murder of more than three and a half thousand prisoners of the camp, complicity in the execution of Soviet prisoners of war and the murder of prisoners with poison gas. According to the prosecutor's office, Schutz "knowingly and voluntarily" participated in the executions.

The defendant denied his guilt throughout the entire trial, which began in the winter of 2021, and stated that he did not know about the massacres that took place on the territory of the camp.

• The persecution of low-ranking Nazis in Germany began about 10 years ago, when the case against SS overseer Ivan Demjanjuk created a legal precedent that allows convictions for participation in the Holocaust without direct evidence of murders, but for complicity and belonging to the Nazi regime, writes Russian Service Bee -bc". in 2011 Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor concentration camp, was found guilty of complicity in the murder of more than 28,000 people. The main piece of evidence in this process was Demjanjuk's SS certificate, where Sobibor was designated as a duty station.
• In 2015, Auschwitz accountant Oskar Gröning was sentenced to two years for complicity in the murder of at least 300,000 prisoners. In 2017, former Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning was sentenced to five years for complicity in the murder of more than 170,000 people. In 2020, Bruno Dey, a former guard at the Schutthof concentration camp, was given a two-year suspended sentence for complicity in the murder of more than five thousand people. In 2021, appeared former secretary Irmgard Fürchner before the court for complicity in the murder of more than 11 thousand people in the Stutthof concentration camp. All those convicted were over 90 years old at the time of the trial.