Former Nazi Camp Guard Convicted in Germany

BERLIN– A German court Thursday discovered a 93- year-old previous prisoner-of-war camp guard guilty of helping in the murder of 5,232 people, in what could be among Germany’s last trials of living Nazi lawbreakers.

The court in the city-state of Hamburg handed Bruno Dey a two-year suspended prison sentence. Mr. Dey was attempted as a juvenile because he was 17 in August 1944 when he began working as an SS guard in the Stutthof prisoner-of-war camp near Gdansk, now part of Poland, according to the indictment.

The 5,232 counts of accessory murder represent the minimum variety of individuals the court estimated passed away in the camp while Mr. Dey served there as a guard until April 1945, a court spokesperson stated.

Mr. Dey’s legal representative, Stefan Waterkamp, pleaded for his client to be acquitted, arguing that he didn’t actively take part in murder and that he didn’t volunteer to become a camp guard. Refusing to comply with orders would have endangered his life, he argued, according to the court spokesman.

A court in the city-state of Hamburg handed Mr. Dey a two-year suspended prison sentence.

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daniel bockwoldt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

The decision can be appealed before the Federal Court of Justice, Germany’s highest court. Mr. Waterkamp didn’t react to an ask for comment.

District attorneys sought a three-year prison sentence but the court took into consideration Mr. Dey’s young age at the time and his remorses, stated the representative.

Mr. Dey throughout the trial apologized to “those who went through this hell and their families,” stated the court representative. But he also worried that he was forced into the role and that it was just through the witness accounts and reports in court that he realized the full scary of the camp.

Reading the verdict, judge Anne Meier-Göring told Mr. Dey the trial had sent out the message that human dignity need to be respected at all costs, even if that expense is one’s own safety. She said Mr. Dey still saw himself as an observer even though he was an “accomplice in this man-made hell.”

Some 65,000 detainees perished in the Stutthof camp after it was set up in 1939, a number of them Jews, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. The court discovered that conditions at Stutthof were so inhumane that its purpose should have been to annihilate its inmates, despite the fact that it wasn’t an extermination camp per se, the court spokesman stated.

The conviction might be among the last of a living Nazi criminal, with couple of still alive either among the criminals or their victims. It comes as Germany is struggling with a revival of anti-Semitism. An attack on a synagogue in October in the eastern city of Halle highlighted the threat still postured by right-wing extremists in the nation.

Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee stated the verdict was unsatisfactory since the sentence was mild and came so long after the reality. He stated it mirrored “the whole suffering of Germany’s legal dealings with Nazi crimes.”

While Germany has actually been praised for confronting its Nazi past, historians and victims’ legal representatives argued that the nation for too long stopped working to adequately prosecute many of those responsible for millions of deaths.

Marek Dunin-Wasowicz, in Warsaw this month, was a witness in Mr. Dey’s trial.

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wojtek radwanski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

A current legal change allowed judges to convict individuals who served in Nazi camps without tying them to particular victims. The change triggered Nazi hunters to push for a last round of convictions.

Mr. Heubner, who went to part of the Hamburg trial, stated that while it was essential to get convictions of Nazis in German courts, even if late, he felt saddened that Mr. Dey seemed to have actually lived the majority of his life without much regret.

” For survivors, the excruciating is the realization that a guy in his mid-90 s lived for years without letting this get to him,” he said.

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