The world’s oldest Nazi convicted of committing war crimes during the Holocaust has died at 102 without ever seeing the inside of a prison cell.
Josef Schütz was last year found guilty of aiding and abetting the murders of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just outside Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
The sick Nazi was found guilty of his horrific crimes by working as an SS guard at the camp, though he was not accused of having actively carried out any of the murders himself.
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He was also found to be complicit in the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war and the murder of others with Zyklon B gas.
"You willingly supported this mass extermination through your occupation," the judge in the case said at the time, according to the BBC.
After the war, Schütz was transferred to a prison camp in Russia before returning to Germany, where he worked as a farmer and a locksmith.
He was brought before a judge at the Neuruppin Regional Court in Brandenburg in 2021 at the age of 100 for his horrific crimes.
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While he was convicted and sentenced in 2022, being given a five-year prison sentence by a German court, he managed to avoid prison as he awaited the outcome of an appeal to a higher court in the country.
The convicted Nazi always denied being an SS guard at the Nazi concentration camp, once telling the court: "I don't know why I'm sitting here in the sin bin. I really had nothing to do with it."
Instead, he said he had worked as a farmhand for most of the war, a claim contradicted by several historical documents identifying an SS guard who bore his name, date and place of birth.
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Tens of thousands of prisoners died at the Sachsenhausen camp during WW2, with many starved to death, worked to the bone, had deadly experiments performed on them or were simply executed by the SS.
More than 200,000 people were imprisoned at the concentration camp, including political prisoners, Jewish, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) people.
The Daily Star has contacted Schütz’s lawyer for comment.
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