A 101-year-old man was convicted on Tuesday in Brandenburg, Germany for his participation in the murders of over 3,500 people at a Nazi concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, during World War II. 

He was sentenced to five years in prison, where he will likely spend the rest of his life.

Although the man denied having been at the camp, the trial evidence showed that he was an SS guard at the camp and aided in the murder of thousands of prisoners from 1942 to 1945.

“You willingly supported this mass extermination with your activity,” Judge Udo Lechtermann said. “You watched deported people being cruelly tortured and murdered there every day for three years.”

Evidence in possession of prosecutors showed the man was a member of the Nazi party. 

Germany’s highest court ruled recently that even if specific crimes could not be proven, people shown to have worked at concentration camps and were accomplices to murder could still be convicted. 

The man was identified as a guard when concentration camp records were examined in 2018 in Moscow.

Due to advanced age and poor physical illness, the trial was interrupted by the defendant’s hospital visits and inability to participate in the proceedings for long periods of time. 

“Even if the defendant will probably not serve the full prison sentence due to his advanced age, the verdict is to be welcomed,” said Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. He expressed regret that the Nazi denied responsibility and showed no remorse. 

“The thousands of people who worked in the concentration camps kept the murder machinery running. They were part of the system, so they should take responsibility for it,” Schuster added.

More than 200,000 people were imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. Thousands died of starvation, illness, hard physical labor, extermination, and medical experimentation.

In 1938, after an anti-Semitic progrom, Kristallnacht, the first group of Jewish prisoners was brought there. Soviet prisoners of war, and others, were also imprisoned there and shot. 

Sachsenhausen was liberated in 1945 by the Russians.

The man’s lawyers are planning an appeal.