The man had been accused in 2021 of collaborating “consciously and voluntarily” in the murder of prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, from January 1942 to February 1945, according to the Neuruppin prosecution, in the northeast. state of Brandenburg.
He was convicted by the Neuruppin Regional Court on Tuesday, court spokeswoman Iris le Claire told CNN.
Le Claire said the trial was a complex process. “It was extraordinarily difficult to find a suitable punishment because the facts happened a long time ago, and the perpetrator is already very large. All this had a mitigating effect on the sentence,” he said.
The large number of people who died under the surveillance of the guard was also taken into account, Le Claire suggested. Under German law, people convicted of murder are usually sentenced to between three and 15 years in prison.
“The verdict is a late compensation for relatives and a very important signal from Germany,” Christoph Heubner of the Auschwitz International Committee told CNN on Tuesday.
Heubner, who followed the trial, criticized the years it had taken German courts to file charges. “Now the wound of the relatives can be healed,” he said.
The convict had always denied being active in the concentration camp, according to Heubner.
The Central Council of the Jews of Germany recognized the sentence. “Although the defendant probably does not serve the full prison sentence due to his advanced age, the verdict is welcome,” council chairman Josef Schuster told CNN.
“The thousands of people working in the concentration camps kept the killing machinery running. They were part of the system, so they would also have to take responsibility for it,” Schuster said. “It is bitter that the defendant has denied his activities at that time until the end and has shown no remorse.”
The man’s name has not been made public, in accordance with German privacy laws. Charges included participation in the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942, and collaboration and collaboration in the killing of prisoners through the use of poison gas, as well as other shootings and the killing of prisoners creating and maintaining hostile conditions in the Sachsenhausen camp. .
Sachsenhausen was built by prisoners and opened in 1936. Of the approximately 200,000 prisoners who passed through, it is estimated that about 100,000 died there. During World War II, the prison inmate population fluctuated between about 11,000 and 48,000 people.
An estimated 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of gypsies, political opponents, homosexuals and people with physical or learning disabilities also died.