According to Deutsche Welle, Schuetz is the oldest living individual to be tried for participating in Nazi crimes during the Second World War. Considering the defendant’s age and health, the trial was done at a gymnasium in Brandenburg an der Havel. As a result, the defendant could only participate for around two and a half hours daily, with frequent breaks for health checkups and hospital stays.
The Neuruppin Regional Court found that Schuetz indeed worked at the concentration camp from 1942 to 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party. The investigation found that the former Nazi guard was guilty of aiding in the murder of 3,518 people.
“The court has come to the conclusion that, contrary to what you claim, you worked in the concentration camp as a guard for about three years,” Presiding Judge Udo Lechtermann said, adding that this makes the defendant complicit in the Nazi Party’s reign of terror.
“You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity,” Lechtermann said. “You watched deported people being cruelly tortured and murdered there every day for three years.”
The court sentenced Schuetz to five years in prison. However, his defense attorney, Stefan Waterkamp, has announced that they would appeal the verdict.
“Even if the defendant will probably not serve the full prison sentence due to his advanced age, the verdict is to be welcomed,” the Head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, said.
“The thousands of people who worked in the concentration camps kept the murder machinery running. They were part of the system, so they should take responsibility for it,” Schuster added. “It is bitter that the defendant has denied his activities at that time until the end and has shown no remorse.”
Head investigator at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff, said Schuetz’s trial “sends a message that if you commit such crimes, even decades later, you might be brought to justice.”
Over 75 years after the atrocities of the Third Reich, prosecutors in Germany are scrambling to bring the last living perpetrators of the Nazi regime to justice before they succumb to old age. The result of a 2011 trial against John Demjanjuk, a man born in 1920 who was found guilty of his involvement with Nazi war crimes, set a precedent for future trials.
Aside from Demjanjuk, the German prosecution has brought Oskar Gröning, referred to as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” and Reinhold Hanning, an SS guard at Auschwitz, to trial. Both were 94-year-old when convicted but died before spending time in prison.
“And it’s a very important thing because it gives closure to the relatives of the victims. The fact that these people all of a sudden feel that their loss is being addressed and the suffering of their family who they lost in the camps is being addressed … is a very important thing.”
COMMENTS