“The level of the sentence is not the decisive factor for the descendants. The fact that a judgement has been passed at all is the most important factor.” These were the words of Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee when commenting on the sentencing of a former SS guard in SS concentration camp.

The Regional Court in Neuruppin has sentenced the 101-year-old man to five years imprisonment for being an accessory to the murder of 3,500 people in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

The judges considered the former camp guard to be proven guilty.

In court the defendant denied ever having been inside Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By the time Sachsenhausen was liberated in 1945, tens of thousands of people had either been murdered or forced to perish in other ways there.

“In Germany, trials of this kind have been dragged out for decades,” said Mr Heubner. The guilty verdict does not depend on the type of activity the concentration camp staff performed. Mr Heubner quoted the concentration camp survivor Eva Fahidi from Budapest: “Each individual who worked in the concentration camp […] was the master over life and death for each of us. […] Each of those people was able to arbitrarily kill, beat, kick or shoot us dead.”