Engelbert Jorschko. Because the defendants were tried under ordinary criminal law, a distinction was made between individual acts of cruelty, which were punished as murder, and participation in the program of mass extermination, which was only charged as being an accomplice to murder. As one of the more brutal SS guards, Baretzki could be proved to have murdered on his own initiative and therefore received a harsher sentence than many of his superiors. In the German press, gruesome stories of the brutality of individual guards, including Baretzki, came to overshadow the larger point of prosecutor Fritz Bauer: that every SS guard, even those who did not personally commit shocking acts of sadism, was a voluntary participant in the system of extermination. Baretzki was found guilty of five counts of murder: he beat a starving prisoner to death and, on 21 June 1944, drowned four prisoners in a water tank of section BIId. He was also convicted as an accomplice to the mass murder of Jews on eleven occasions. He assisted in the murder of at least 3,000 people by participating in the liquidation of the Theresienstadt family camp in March 1944. During five selections on the Judenrampe, he was an accomplice to at least 1,000 murders. On five occasions he was found to have assisted in block selections where worn-out inmates were selected for death; in each of these incidents, more than 50 people were murdered. In addition, the court found that he was guilty of three other crimes. These included punishing prisoners in section BIId of the camp who attempted to communicate with inmates in other parts of the camp by forcing them to perform strenuous exercises, during which he shot at least five prisoners. The court did not assign additional punishment for these crimes but used them as further evidence of Baretzki's brutality. Otto Dov Kulka and other witnesses testified that Baretzki killed other prisoners, but he was not charged with these murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and eight years. Because the court described him as a "simpleton" and "less intelligent than all the other defendants", Baretzki's admission that he knew that the mass murder of Jews was a crime was used to prove that the other defendants knew that their actions were criminal as well. He was the only defendant to testify against other defendants, offering damning testimony about the conditions at the camp. About