Nazi camp guard ‘sorry’ for deaths of 5,000 inmates

A NAZI SS guard accused of complicity in the murder of more than 5,000 Jews at a concentration camp is ‘sorry’ for his actions, a court heard yesterday.

Bruno Dey, now 93, was a teenager at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland. He told investigators he heard the screams of Jews in the gas chambers and saw bodies carted to the camp’s crematorium.

There is no evidence of direct involvement but prosecutors say he was a ‘small wheel in the machinery of murder’.

In what could be one of the last cases of surviving Nazi guards, Dey was pushed into the Hamburg court in a wheelchair.

His lawyer Stefan Waterkamp said: ‘He felt sorry for what he did. It was also clear to him that (the inmates) were not in there because they were criminals. He had compassion for them. But he did not see himself in a position to free them.’

The case was opened in 2016, after investigators found SS clothing with his name in the Stutthof archives. Because Dey was 17 when he began serving in 1944, he is being tried in a juvenile court and faces up to ten years’ jail.

Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, said: ‘Just because more senior criminals got away with a crime doesn’t mean that the more minor criminals are not guilty.’