Josef Schütz, a former Nazi concentration camp guard sentenced to prison in 2022, has died at the age of 102, a source close to the case told AFP on Wednesday.

The former Waffen SS non-commissioned officer was convicted in June 2022 of “complicity” in the murder of at least 3,500 prisoners when he was active between 1942 and 1945 at the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin.

Schütz was sentenced by a court in Brandenburg-Hafel (east) to five years in prison, becoming the oldest person convicted of complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.

His lawyer announced he would appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals, delaying the execution of that sentence until at least this year, which seemed hypothetical given Schütz’s poor health.

Not once during about 30 hearings did he express the slightest remorse as he revealed numerous stories from his past.

After the war, Schütz was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, then settled in Brandenburg (the region around Berlin), worked as a farmer, and then as a locksmith, without worry.

From the moment of its opening in 1936 until its liberation by the Soviet authorities on April 22, 1945, the Sachsenhausen camp housed about 200,000 prisoners, mostly political opponents, Jews and homosexuals.

Tens of thousands of them died, mostly from exhaustion caused by forced labor and harsh conditions.

Although he was an “ordinary” camp guard, Schütz received a heavy sentence compared to other recent decisions, indicating the increased severity of German justice.

In July 2020, the court sentenced the former guard of the Stutthof camp, 93-year-old Bruno Day, to two years of suspended imprisonment. In December 2022, the 97-year-old former secretary of the camp received two years of probation.

The most revealing case was the sentencing of former Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk to five years in prison in 2011. He appealed and died a year later without ever going to prison.