At the bar
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Josef Schütz, 101, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen camp, is on trial in the court of Brandenburg an der Havel. These late proceedings allow the victims who are still alive to express themselves. Among them, Marcel Suillerot, a former French railway worker who is the key witness in one of the last Nazi trials in history.
Marcel Suillerot had no chance of escaping. “You entered through the door. You’ll come out of it through the chimney.” had sworn the SS commander on his arrival at the Sachsenhausen camp on January 25, 1943. At 98, the former French railway worker recounts his ordeal by videoconference. He is the key witness in one of the last Nazi trials in history, that of Josef Schütz, a former SS guard now 101 years old, accused of complicity in murder in 3,518 cases.
Arrested and tortured by the French police for distributing anti-Pétain leaflets in Dijon, Marcel Suillerot was handed over as a “dangerous criminal” to the Germans in 1943. “When we arrived at Oranienburg station [au nord de Berlin, ndlr] with the comrades, we went to the camp on foot. It was 8 o’clock in the morning. The children were going to school. They threw stones at us calling us terrorists,” he says.
Suffering from diphtheria, the resistance fighter narrowly avoids the gas chamber thanks to a German communist who works in the infirmary. In the factory of the aircraft manufacturer Heinkel, where he manufactures aircraft seats for the Luftwaffe (air force), he narrowly escapes an Allied bombardment which kills 500 people. After the camp was evacuated on April 21, 1945, he survived the “death march”. On the road, the prisoners drop like flies, dead of cold, starvation or arbitrarily executed by the SS. “I had learned to feed myself with …