A 93-year-old former Nazi guard at the Stutthof concentration camp was convicted on Thursday of 5,232 accessory charges of murder by a German court.
The judicial proceedings against Bruno Dey were unusual: they took place in two two-hour sessions a week due to his age and were tried in a juvenile court because he was between 17 and 18 years old when he served in the camp between 1944 and 1945. in the end. months of the second world war.
The Hamburg state court also had to navigate the coronavirus pandemic and take additional precautions.
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Prosecutors had asked for a three-year sentence, but Dey received a suspended two-year sentence.
93-year-old German Bruno D., accused of being an SS guard involved in the murder of thousands of prisoners, many of them Jews, between August 1944 and April 1945, in the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof near Gdansk, Poland, arrives to await his verdict at his trial, in a court in Hamburg, Germany, on July 23, 2020. (Fabian Bimmer / Pool via AP)
“How can you get used to the horror?” Chief Justice Anne Meier-Goering asked when she announced the verdict.
In a final statement earlier this week, the German wheelchair retiree apologized for his role in the Nazi destruction machine, saying “it should never be repeated.”
“Today, I want to apologize to all the people who went through this hellish madness,” Dey told the court.
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Prosecutors prevailed to secure a conviction for Dey by relying on an established precedent in previous Nazi crime cases that they forgo providing evidence on each specific murder, an almost impossible task due to the circumstances of concentration camp-related deaths and time elapsed. . Instead, prosecutors argued that policing a camp whose sole purpose is murder is sufficient as an accessory to a murder conviction.
93-year-old German Bruno D., accused of being an SS guard involved in the murder of thousands of prisoners, many of them Jews, between August 1944 and April 1945, in the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof near Gdansk, Poland, arrives to await his verdict at his trial, in a court in Hamburg, Germany, on July 23, 2020. (Fabian Bimmer / Pool via AP)
Prosecutors argued that, as a guard at Stutthof from August 1944 to April 1945, Dey, while “not a fervent worshiper of Nazi ideology,” helped all the murders that took place there during that period as a “little wheel in the murder machine. “
The camp was a so-called “labor education camp” for forced laborers, mainly Polish and Soviet citizens, and most of whom were Jews, were sent to serve sentences, and often died.
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Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
More than 60,000 people were killed in Stutthof by lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly into their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced to go outside in winter without clothes until they died from exposure or were executed in a gas chamber.
As a guard there, Dey said his position was generally to monitor prisoner work teams working outside the camp.
Dey acknowledged hearing the screams from the camp’s gas chambers and saw the bodies being carried off to burn, but said he never fired his gun and once allowed a group to smuggle meat from a dead horse they had discovered from back to camp.
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“The images of misery and horror have haunted me all my life,” he testified.
For more than 20 years, Nazi hunters have tried cases against former concentration camp prison guards across Europe, and while many of the convictions have been labeled the latest of their kind, several still remain under investigation.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
