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Berlin Germany – Bruno Dey, who became a guard at one of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi death camps when he was just 17 years old, was found guilty of being an accessory to more than 5,000 murders and received a suspended prison sentence in Germany. Given his health condition now at the age of 93, he received a suspended sentence of two years.
Between August 1944 and April 1945, Dey served as a guard in the SS “Head of Death” unit in the Stutthof concentration camp, 24 miles east of the Polish Nazi-occupied city of Gdansk.
On Thursday, a court in Hamburg, Germany convicted him of 5,232 accessory charges for murder, the number of victims believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his time there between 1944 and 1945. He was also convicted of one accessory charge. for murder. attempted murder.
Stutthof museum
Dey never denied being a guard on the field, but constantly said in court that he considered himself innocent, had not directly participated in any murder, and claimed that he was unaware of the atrocities. However, on Monday he apologized to the victims, saying they had been through “hell of madness.”
Dey said Monday that it was only through the trial that he realized the extent of cruelty and suffering in the camp. “Such a thing must never happen again,” he said in his apology to the victims.
His defense attorney had argued that SS membership alone could not make Dey an accessory to the murders, and that he had not recognized his service at the time as involvement in Nazi crimes.
The 5,232 victims killed during Dey’s service include some 5,000 who died of typhoid in horribly unsanitary conditions in the field, but Dey was also involved in the executions of 200 people who were gassed with Zyklon B, and 30 more who received a shot in the neck. .
As Dey was under 18 at the time of the alleged crime, he was tried in the Hamburg juvenile court. He had faced up to 10 years in prison, but it was always considered unlikely that he would serve a prison term due to his old age.
The American Plaintiff
Judy Meisel was one of 20 co-plaintiffs in the case against Dey. She witnessed the atrocities committed by the Germans at Stutthof. Along with her mother and sister Rachel, she was sent to the concentration camp from her native Lithuania in 1941 after Hitler’s forces invaded.
David sherman
“His mother was killed in the gas chamber,” Meisel’s grandson Benjamin Cohen told CBS News in October last year, after watching the trial begin. “They were tortured, their hair was pulled out by two SS men when they arrived at the camp. It was total brutality.”
Meisel is now a US citizen and lives in Minnesota. He was unable to travel to Germany for the trial for health reasons.
She and her sister managed to escape from Stutthof.
In a statement sent to CBS News on Thursday, Benjamin Cohen said his family viewed the verdict as “a powerful message.”
“We hope the world can learn from this judgment about where racism and hatred can lead,” said Cohen. “The most important thing for us is that these horrible things should never happen again and that the world can be educated about the ability of apparently normal people to be part of the most horrible evil.”
She said her grandmother now “hopes to focus on other things like her great-grandchildren.”
Courtesy of Ben Cohen.
A dying breed
The verdict in Hamburg could well be one of the latest dictates of Hitler’s Nazi crimes, as there are very few suspects left alive.
Since the 2011 sentencing of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian prisoner of war who became a Nazi collaborator, the criminal justice system in Germany has opened multiple cases against former Nazi personnel. The Demjanjuk trial set a new precedent, allowing suspects to be tried as accessories to the Nazi killing machine, even if they did not commit individual killings.
In the Dey case, prosecutors argued that he had played a crucial role in the Stutthof mass killings by preventing prisoners from escaping from the camp. Before her release in April 1945, some 65,000 people were killed in the camp, 70% of them Jewish.
Recently, another former Stutthof camp guard was charged in Wuppertal, Germany, but it was not yet clear Thursday whether he would be deemed fit for trial.
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