Nazi prison guard, 100, implicated in thousands of deaths says he is innocent

Josef Schuetz worked at a concentration camp outside Berlin from 1942 until 1945

Defendant Josef Schuetz sits next to his lawyer Stefan Waterkamp as he waits for the start of his trial in Germany. AFP.

A 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, the oldest person charged with complicity in Second World War atrocities, told a German court on Friday that he was not guilty.

Josef Schuetz protested his innocence over accusations that he was involved in the murder of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.

When asked about his work at the camp, he insisted that he "knows nothing" about what happened there and that he did "absolutely nothing".

Allegations against Mr Schuetz include aiding and abetting the "execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942" and the murder of prisoners "using the poisonous gas Zyklon B".

The Sachsenhausen camp detained more than 200,000 people between 1936 and 1945, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people.

Tens of thousands of inmates were murdered, or died as a result of forced labour, medical experiments, hunger or disease before the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.

Mr Schuetz's defence said at the opening of the case on Thursday that he would not speak about his time at the camp and would provide only details about his personal life.

Arriving alone at the hearing with his walking aid, Mr Schuetz recounted in detail his past, including his work at his family's farm in Lithuania with his seven siblings before his enrolment in the army in 1938.

After the war, he was transferred to a detainees camp in Russia before he was sent to Brandenburg state in Germany where he worked as a farmer and later as a locksmith.

Speaking with a clear voice, he spoke about his past birthdays with his daughters and grandchildren, or about his late wife.

"My wife always said that 'there's no other man in the world like you'," said Mr Schuetz, a widower since 1986.

Mr Schuetz remains free during the trial. Even if convicted, he is highly unlikely to be put behind bars given his age.

More than seven decades after the Second World War, German prosecutors are racing to bring the last surviving perpetrators of Nazi atrocities to justice.

The 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, on the basis that he served as part of Hitler's killing machine, set a legal precedent and paved the way for several of these twilight justice cases.

Since then, courts have handed down several guilty verdicts on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual accused.

Among those brought to late justice were Oskar Groening, an accountant at Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz.

Both were convicted at the age of 94 of complicity in mass murder, but died before they could be imprisoned.

Most recently, former SS guard Bruno Dey was last year found guilty, at the age of 93, and was given a two-year suspended sentence.

In the northern German town of Itzehoe, a 96-year-old former secretary at a Nazi death camp is on trial for complicity in murder.

She dramatically fled before the start of her trial, but was caught several hours later. Her trial resumes on October 19.