(MENAFN) A German court sentenced a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard to five years in prison, making him the oldest person ever tried for involvement in war crimes during the Holocaust.
Josef Schuetz was convicted of being an accessory to murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, according to Neuruppin Regional Court presiding judge Udo Lechtermann on Tuesday.
The pensioner, who now resides in Brandenburg, had pled innocent, claiming he did "absolutely nothing" and was unaware of the heinous acts committed in the camp.
“I don’t know why I am here,” he stated at the close of his trial.
Prosecutors, however, alleged he "knowingly and voluntarily" engaged in the killings of 3,518 captives at the camp and demanded that he be sentenced to five years in jail.
Schuetz said in the trial, which began in October of last year, that he worked as a farm laborer in Pasewalk in northeastern Germany throughout the relevant time period.
However, the court determined that he operated as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing at the camp on the outskirts of Berlin between 1942 and 1945, according to the German news agency DPA. At the moment, he was 21 years old.
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