Germany sentenced 101-year-old former Sachsenhausen concentration camp guard to five years in prison
Taking into account the war crimes in Ukraine, the sentence handed down in Germany to 101-year-old Josef Schütz, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, is very demonstrative.
Schütz was sentenced to five years in prison for being an accomplice. He personally did not kill prisoners, at least the court did not have such evidence, however, from 1942 to 1945, at least 3,500 people were killed in the concentration camp, and Schütz, who regularly stood guard in the watchtower, could not have been unaware of those crimes. The argument about the oath and the fulfillment of the order is invalid in this case, since we are not talking about confronting an armed enemy.
The first sentenced concentration camp guard whose personal involvement in the killings was not proven was 91-year-old John Demjanjuk in 2011. Since then, the 94-year-old Auschwitz accountant Oskar Gröning, the guard of the same concentration camp, Reinhold Hanning, and many other Nazis have been convicted. Today, German Justice is in a hurry to bring other cases against those criminals, who can still be found alive, to sentences.
“I am innocent, I did absolutely nothing,” that is how Schütz reacted to the accusations.
In the same way, over time, the personnel of dozens of so-called filtration camps deployed by Russia in the temporarily occupied territories will be trying to justify themselves. However, the legal precedent of punishment for passive participation in war crimes has been created, and this punishment will be inevitable.
