Nazi camp guard Josef Schütz dies at 102

The oldest person to be convicted over crimes committed during the Holocaust has died at the age of 102.

Josef Schütz was found guilty last June of assisting in the murder of thousands of prisoners at Sachsenhausen near Berlin between 1942 and 1945.

He was given a five-year prison sentence but remained free while he awaited the outcome of an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice.

Schütz had always denied being an SS guard at the Nazi concentration camp.

He was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murders of 3,518 people. He was also complicit in the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war and the murder of others with Zyklon B gas.

Tens of thousands of people died at Sachsenhausen during World War Two from starvation, forced labour, medical experiments and murder by the SS.

More than 200,000 people were imprisoned there, including political prisoners as well as Jews, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies).

Schütz expressed no regret during his trial, telling the German court: “I don’t know why I’m sitting here in the sin bin. I really had nothing to do with it.”

Despite his name and birth details found on documents of an SS guard, he claimed he had not been at the camp and worked instead as a farm labourer.

“You willingly supported this mass extermination through your occupation,” the judge said at the time.

Germany has been trying to bring former Nazi war criminals to court after a landmark case in 2011, in which ex-SS guard John Demjanjuk was found guilty.

That verdict prompted a search for individuals who were still alive.

Four years later, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, Oskar Gröning, was given a four-year jail term. Like Schütz, he never spent a day in jail due to a series of appeals – and he died in 2018.

And a 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary, Irmgard Furchner, became the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades in December. She was found guilty of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people at Stutthof camp, near the city of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk in Poland).