A 101-year-old former SS guard He was sentenced this Tuesday by a German court to five years in prison for complicity in the murder of 3,518 prisoners from the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, the media reported.
According to Udo Lechtermann, the presiding judge, the man, a concentration camp guard between 1942 and 1945, “knowingly supported mass extermination” while in office.
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The Prosecutor’s Office had requested five years in prison for the defendant, while the lawyer Thomas Walther, representing the civil party, advocated a prison sentence of several years, not less than five.
Two other civil party representatives had demanded a guilty verdict, without naming a specific sentence.
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Defense lawyer Stefan Waterkamp demanded the acquittal of the accused and referred to the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court in arguing that the mere fact of having worked as a guard in a concentration camp is not sufficient reason for a conviction.
He also added that there is no evidence of specific acts on the complicity of his client.
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The prosecution also referred to the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, according to which specific acts do not have to be proven; enough with the “promoter effect” which is derived in general from the performance as a guard.
The accused denied until the end before the Provincial Court of Neuruppin that he had been a guard in Sachsenhausendeclared that during those years he worked as an agricultural laborer in Mecklenburg-Vorpomerania and that he did not know what acts he was being accused of, with which he said he had nothing to do.
The indictment, for its part, is based on extensive documentation with the defendant’s name, date and place of birth, as well as other documents.
For organizational reasons, the trial did not take place in Neuruppin, but in Brandeburg an der Havel, where the elderly man lives, and had to be suspended several times due to the defendant’s state of health.
His lawyer had already announced that he would appeal the sentence in the event of a prison sentence.
Around 200,000 prisoners were interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945.
Tens of thousands died of hunger, disease, forced labour, medical experiments and mistreatment, victims of the systematic extermination actions of the SS.
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