A 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard told a German court on Friday that he was not guilty, AFP reports.
"I am innocent," said Josef Schuetz, who stands accused of "knowingly and willingly" assisting in the murder of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
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 died from forced labor, murder, medical experiments, hunger or disease before the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.
When asked Friday about his work at the camp, Schuetz insisted that he knew nothing about what happened there and that he did "absolutely nothing".
Allegations against 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".
Schuetz, whose trial began on Thursday, is the oldest defendant to be tried in a court for crimes committed during the Nazi era.
His lawyer said on Thursday that his client would not testify about the crimes he is accused of, but would only comment later about the circumstances that led to him becoming a guard at the death camp.
Germany’s crackdown on Nazi war criminals began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp and sentenced to five years. He died in 2012.
Last year, 93-year-old Stutthof camp guard Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945.
Earlier this year, German prosecutors charged a 100-year-old man who allegedly served as a Nazi concentration camp guard where more than 100,000 people were killed during World War II.
Days earlier, Germany charged a former secretary from the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp with complicity in the murders of 10,000 people.
Last week, Irmgard Furchner, a 96-year-old former secretary at Stutthof, failed to turn up for her trial after leaving her retirement home near Hamburg.
Police detained her several hours later and she was remanded in custody before the resumption of her trial on October 19. She was released from custody a few days later.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)