The oldest Nazi ever to be prosecuted for crimes committed during the Holocaust has died at age 102.
Josef Schuetz was convicted last year on more than 3,500 counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
The man, whom local media have identified only as Josef S. in line with German privacy rules, was sentenced to five years in prison last June but remained free pending appeal.
He had denied working as an SS guard at the Sachsenhausen camp, but the state court in Neuruppin concluded that documents with the man's name, date and place of birth showed he had in fact been an enlisted member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing stationed at the camp on the outskirts of Berlin between 1942 and 1945.
"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 said.
Lechtermann said that the defendant had assisted the murderous system established by the Nazis: "You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity."
According to a legal precedent set in 2015, anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted in Germany for being an accessory to the murders committed there.
"You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity," Lechtermann said at the time. "You watched deported people being cruelly tortured and murdered there every day for three years."
Some people interned in Sachsenhausen were murdered with Zyklon-B, the poison gas also used in other extermination camps where millions of Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
Germany has been bringing numerous former Nazi war criminals to court after a landmark case in 2011, in which ex-SS guard John Demjanjuk was found guilty.
His trial prompted a search for individuals who were still alive.
Four years later, Oskar Gröning was given a four-year jail term and later died in 2018.
Irmgard Furchner became the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades in December.
The 97-year-old was found guilty of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people at Stutthof camp where she was the concentration camp secretary,
