The Neuruppin district court found the 101-year-old Josef S. guilty of aiding and abetting murder and attempted murder on Tuesday in Brandenburg an der Havel. With the sentence, the judges followed the request of the public prosecutor’s office.
The Chamber therefore came to the conclusion that S. had been deployed in the concentration camp for three years. The accused “willingly supported the mass extermination” with his guard work, said the presiding judge Udo Lechtermann.
The prosecution had accused S. of being an accessory to murder in more than 3,500 cases. Accordingly, between 1942 and 1945 he is said to have “knowingly and willingly” participated in the murder of camp inmates. He is said to have belonged to the guard battalion of the concentration camp, in which the SS had stationed a large contingent, until 1945.
Prosecutors asked for five years in prison. The defense, on the other hand, applied for an acquittal because their client could not be proven to have done anything specific to his work in the camp.
During the trial that began in October last year, the accused himself denied having worked in the camp. In his last word before the verdict was announced, Josef S. again protested his innocence.
In the concentration camp north of Berlin, which was set up by prisoners in the summer of 1936, more than 200,000 people were imprisoned between the time it was built and the end of the Second World War in 1945 – among them political opponents of the Nazi regime and members of the Nazis National Socialists persecuted groups such as Jews and Sinti and Roma. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, forced labour, medical experiments and abuse, or became victims of systematic SS extermination operations.
For organizational reasons, the trial was conducted in a sports hall in Brandenburg an der Havel, where the 101-year-old lives. The elderly man had only limited capacity to stand trial and was only able to take part in the trial for around two and a half hours a day.
Source: Nachrichten
