A former Nazi security guard has been sentenced to five years in prison in a German court.

As reported by The Independent, the 101-year-old man - who has not been identified - has been found guilty of 3,518 counts accessory to murder as a result of his service at the Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II.

He was accused of working as a member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing on the outskirts of Berlin between 1942 and 1945.

The Brandenburg state resident was sentenced to five years by the Neuruppin Regional Court on Tuesday (June 28) after the court ruled that he aided and abetted the murder of thousands of prisoners.

On Monday, the man once again denied ever working as an SS guard at the camp.

As the proceedings came to a close, the man told the court: "I don't know why I am here."

Alleged crimes brought against the man included participating in "execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 194" and the deployment of "poisonous gas Zyklon B".

"H" claims that at the time of his alleged crimes, he was working as a farm laborer and had "absolutely nothing" to do with the atrocities committed at Sachsenhausen. Prosecutors, however, successfully argued otherwise, stating that the man "knowingly and willingly" participated in crimes as a guard.

The court was shown documents for a guard at the camp with the same name, birthday, and birthplace as the accused.

"The court has come to the conclusion that, contrary to what you claim, you worked in the concentration camp as a guard for about three years," presiding Judge Udo Lechtermann told the man, adding: "You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity."

Per The New York Times, prosecutors were unable to link the man directly to any deaths of the camp's prisoners.

The man is reportedly the oldest person in history to have stood trial for Nazi war crimes.

His lawyer has revealed that his client will appeal the ruling if authorities attempt to send him to prison.

Due to the man's age and health, officials would need to acquire declaration by a medical commission stating that he is fit enough to be imprisoned.

The trial has been ongoing since October, 2021, with proceedings taking place at the Neuruppin regional court. Due to the fact that the trial was interrupted on multiple occasions due to reasons associated with the man's health, it is unclear if he will ever see the inside of a prison cell.

Although, Thomas Will - who heads Germany's government office tasked with investigating Nazi-era crimes - says "murder does not have a statute of limitations".

"It is what’s right and of course it would have been what was right 70 years ago," Will said.

The Times reports that German prosecutors are "racing" to bring surviving Nazi criminals to justice as the perpetrators grow older and their numbers dwindle.

Germany’s highest criminal court has even ruled that former guards who worked at Nazi concentration camps could be convicted, even if no specific crime(s) could be proven against them.

Thousands of prisoners were executed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during is operation under the Nazis.

It was eventually liberated by Soviet troops in 1945 - with approximately 3,400 inmates being found alive.

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A 98-year-old former Nazi concentration guard has been indicted on charges of aiding and abetting the murder of more than 3,300 people during the Holocaust.

The man’s name was not made public by prosecutors, in accordance with German privacy laws, as reported by CNN. German authorities said on Friday that the man is believed to have been involved with the murder of over 3,300 people during WWII.

The public prosecutor in the western city of Giessen, near Frankfurt, said in a statement that the man worked at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945.

The man, who was a minor at the time of the alleged crimes, is accused of “having assisted in the cruel and insidious killing of thousands of prisoners,” prosecutors said.

The unnamed man will face a juvenile court because he was under the age of 18 when he served at Sachsenhausen. The statement added that the trial is expected to be in Hanau, close to the man’s home, in accordance with juvenile law.

A psychiatric assessment of the suspect in October 2022 found that he is fit to stand trial, but within certain limitations, the statement concluded.

Germany is racing against time to bring the last surviving perpetrators of Nazi war crimes – now well into old age – to justice.

Last year, another former Sachsenhausen guard, aged 101, was sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted for aiding and abetting the murder of 3,518 people during the Holocaust.

A 96-year-old German woman fled before standing trial for crimes she was alleged to have committed while working as a stenographer and typist in the commandant’s office at the concentration camp in Stutthof, near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk. She was later found by local authorities and brought before court, where she was convicted on similar charges.

At the time of her trial, one survivor of the Stutthof camp testified and provided a harrowing account of the horrors that took place there.

Speaking via video link, Risa Silbert, 93, said: "We had cannibalism in the camp. People were hungry and they cut up the corpses and they wanted to take out the liver." She added that her father and brother were murdered by the Nazis in 1941, while she and her mother were placed in a ghetto before being transported to the camp."

Sachsenhausen was built by prisoners and opened in 1936. Of the roughly 200,000 prisoners who passed through the camp, around 100,000 are thought to have died there. During World War II, the camp’s inmate population fluctuated between about 11,000 and 48,000 people.

An estimated 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Also killed were hundreds of thousands of Roma people, political opponents, homosexuals, and people with physical or learning disabilities.

Featured image credit: MAURIZIO GAMBARINI / Getty

A former Nazi death camp worker dubbed the "Secretary of Evil" has spoken out for the first time during the trial for her role in 10,000 deaths in the camp during World War II.

Irmgard Furchner, 97, is the first woman in decades to be tried within Germany for crimes related to the Nazi era, as reported by the Daily Mail.

Prosecutors have stated this could be one of the last trials related to crimes committed during the holocaust, due to the aging population of those who were around during the atrocities of the Holocaust, between 1941 and 1945.

Furchner was a teenager when the alleged crimes took place, and has therefore been tried at a juvenile court.

Speaking about the events for the first time in 14 months, the 97-year-old said: "I'm sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time."

Stutthof was a concentration camp established in Gdansk, Poland, by the Nazis in 1939. Over 100,000 people were transported there. The camp was swept by a typhus outbreak in 1942 and again in 1944, as conditions were brutal, per the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The prisoners - largely consisting of both non-Jewish and Jewish Poles - who were deemed too weak to work would be killed in the gas chambers, or by lethal injection. More than 60,000 people lost their lives in the camp.

Furchner's role within the camp was as a secretary, working within the command block. During her trial, she alleged that due to the nature of her work, she was unaware of the murderous regime, per the Daily Mail.

It was later revealed that her husband was an SS officer during the second world war, and in 1954 he testified he was aware of what took place during the Holocaust.

Her role was to take dictation of the orders from the commander of the camp - Paul Werner Hoppe - and handle his correspondence.

Survivors from Stutthof testified during the trial and gave harrowing accounts of the horrors that took place there.

Speaking via video link, Risa Silbert, 93, explained: "We had cannibalism in the camp. People were hungry and they cut up the corpses and they wanted to take out the liver." She added that her father and brother were murdered by the Nazis in 1941, while she and her mother were placed in a ghetto before being transported to the camp.

She also stated that the prisoners would be forced out of bed at 4:00 or 5:00 AM each morning, and those unable to stand still were whipped by the SS guards.

Furchner's prosecutors claim she was complicit in 10,000 deaths during her time at Stutthof, and want the judge to hand down a two-year suspended sentence. Her lawyers claim the evidence presented "had not shown beyond doubt" that she had full knowledge of the atrocities.

The 97-year-old attempted to flee from her retirement home as the trial was due to start in September 2021, but law enforcement caught her several hours later in Hamburg.

The verdict as to whether she is deemed to be complicit with the killings will be announced on December 20.

Featured image credit: Thomas fisher / Alamy

It's been nearly 73 years since the Holocaust came to its end, but the scars of the victims will remain for eternity. The mass murder of some six million European Jews, as well as millions of other persecuted groups, including gypsies, homosexual people and disabled people, remains one of the most horrifying events in history and it is our responsibility to remember it forever. However, perhaps even more crucial is our duty to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.

We have a habit of looking back at the events of the late 1930s and mid-1940s and convincing ourselves that the attitudes that prevailed among Nazi supporters belong in the past. However, every now and again, something happens that makes us admit to ourselves that the persecution of the past could be easily repeated, and isn't worlds apart from what is going on on our doorsteps every single day.

A chief example of this is the brutal murder of an 85-year-old woman in Paris this month. Mireille Knoll was stabbed to death and set on fire in her apartment in the city’s 11th arrondissement in an antisemitic attack on March 23. The murder is perhaps made even more harrowing due to the knowledge that Knoll was a Holocaust survivor who narrowly escaped a mass round-up of French Jews during the Second World War in 1942. This was a woman who survived everything the Nazis threw at her, but couldn't survive 2018.

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The elderly grandmother's body was discovered on Friday evening. Evidence showed that up to five fires were started in her property and that the victim was also stabbed 11 times during the assault. On the Monday, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced  that two men were being investigated for an antisemitic hate crime, of the two men arrested, a 29-year-old with previous criminal convictions, was identified by Knoll’s son as “someone my mother knew very well and considered a son." Broadcaster France 3 reported that Knoll had known the man over a period of twenty years since his childhood. In addition, the second suspect was alleged to be a 22-year-old homeless man known to the police for previous criminal offences.

The tragic incident has shaken France, with mourners set to gather in Paris on Wednesday 28 March for a silent march to condemn the gruesome killing. However, the incident is far from unorthodox and will go down in history as not a standalone attack, but instead the latest in a string of antisemitic attacks that have left France's Jewish community terrified.

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Despite France having the largest Jewish community in Europe, with roughly half a million people who worship Judaism living there, a violent strain of antisemitism has emerged there over the past few years. Knoll’s murder comes just a year after another elderly woman was killed in the same neighbourhood. Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jew, was beaten to death in her home in April. It took almost a year for an investigation to conclude that the murder was, in fact, a hate crime, with many speculating that the discriminatory aspect of the incident was hushed up in the media by the government out of fear that it would garner support for National Front leader, Marie le Pen, who was then running against French President Emmanuel Macron in the French election.

Halimi's murder followed numerous reports of racist hate crimes taking place across France including in 2012 when an Islamist gunman shot dead three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse and in 2015, when an associate of the two brothers who massacred a group of cartoonists at satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo killed four people at a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

The country is no stranger to anti-Semitic protests either, one instance in July 2014 seeing hundreds of people gather to chant “Mort aux Juifs": "Death to the Jews." Tragically, the prejudice has led many Jews to leave their home country and emigrate to Israel; reportedly, around 3,200 people left in 2013, a startling 63 per cent jump when compared to 2012. Furthermore, nearly 8,000 French Jews allegedly left for Israel in the wake of the 2015 supermarket attack.

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This is not to say that the government aren't well-aware of the issue. In 2015, France invested €100 million in a long-term plan to fight racism and antisemitism, with French Prime Minister at the time Manuel Valls declaring "French Jews must no longer be scared to be Jewish" and "French Muslims must no longer be scared to be Muslim."

Furthermore, current President Macon has named anti-Semitic behaviour "the shame of France", stating in March 2018: "We must never falter, we will never falter in denouncing antisemitism and fighting against this scourge. Antisemitism is the opposite of the Republic, it is the shame of France, and we fight every day for a Republic of honour and fraternity." The leader has claimed that the government would continue to fight the problem in schools, at synagogues and online, vowing a crackdown on racist attitudes and actions.

However, it seems that no matter what the French government says, the hate continues and many of the Jewish community are left with just two options: Leave their homes, or live in fear. With a rising number of Jews claiming that they feel unsafe in their homes and an EU survey suggesting that 40 per cent of Jews in France avoid wearing clothing that identifies them, it is to be expected that more and more Jews will be leaving the country, with the "shame of France" living to fight another day.