A former Nazi concentration camp guard who was sentenced to five years in jail last year for complicity in war crimes has died at the age 102, a source close to the case told AFP on Wednesday.

Josef Schuetz was found guilty of being an accessory to murder in at least 3,500 cases while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.

The verdict made him the oldest person ever to be convicted of complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.

It had always seemed unlikely that Schuetz would ever go to jail as he remained free while awaiting the outcome of an appeal.

Schuetz expressed no regret during his trial and pleaded innocent, saying he did "absolutely nothing".

More than 200,000 people, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people, were detained at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1936 and 1945.

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.

In 2020, 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.

In 2021, 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.

Some of those convicted of Nazi-era war crimes never served their sentences as they passed away before being jailed.