“Voluntarily aided mass extermination”, reads the sentence
A 101-year-old German was today sentenced to 5 years in prison by a court in the city of Brandenburg, which found him guilty of cooperating in the murder of 3,500 prisoners between 1942 and 1945 in the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. In those years, the convict worked as a guard at the concentration camp in the town of Oranienburg, bordering the north of Berlin. Working as a camp guard, “he voluntarily supported the mass extermination,” said the presiding judge, Judge Udo Lechtermann, while reading the verdict. The verdict meets the demands of both the prosecutors hearing the case and the private prosecution of attorney Thomas Walther. The defense had asked for an acquittal because it was not possible to prove concrete acts of collaboration with his client’s Nazi destruction machine during the trial.
Despite the existence of evidence against him and the testimonies of witnesses, the old man denied having worked as a guard in the aforementioned concentration camp throughout the trial. During the time he is said to have been in Sachsenhausen, he claimed to have worked as a farm laborer in Pasewalk, in the northern German region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. “I don’t know what I should have done,” the defendant said in his closing statement, claiming to be from Lithuania and not understanding what issues had been discussed during the trial. “I don’t know why I’m in the dock. I have nothing to do with what they say,” the centenarian insisted. After it started in October last year, the trial had to be halted a number of times because of the defendant’s illness.
For organizational reasons and because of the defendant’s advanced age, the trial took place in a sports hall in Brandenburg, the old man’s residence, and not in the town of Neuruppin. Forensic specialists pointed out that their ability to attend the trial was limited, so the sessions lasted only 2 and a half hours with their presence. The Nazi concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, built in 1936, housed more than 200,000 prisoners, many of them politicians, until the end of the war. More than 200 Spanish Republicans are among the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp. Francisco Largo Caballero, head of the Spanish government at the start of the Civil War, was captured in exile in France by Nazi forces in 1942 and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen until the camp was liberated by the Red Army.
Source: La Verdad
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