Chaos in SS guard’s trial as ‘false witness’ w
THE TRIAL of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former SS guard at the Stutthof concentration camp, took a bizarre turn last week as a coplaintiff withdrew from the case after inconsistencies were found in the story of his background.
An investigation conducted by the German newsweekly Der Spiegel found that Moshe Peter Loth, 76, had not been imprisoned in Stutthof as an infant, as he had previously claimed, and neither was he the grandson of a Jewish woman who died in the gas chambers there.
“Please accept my most sincere apologies for having caused any problems”, he wrote in a statement submitted to the court in Hamburg on January 11.
Mr Loth, who resides in Port Charlotte, Florida, made headlines when he took the stand on November 12 and publicly forgave Bruno Dey, who stands accused of aiding and abetting the murder of 5,230 prisoners at Stutthof between 1944 and 1945.
“Watch out everyone, I’m going to forgive him,” he declared, before bending down towards the wheelchairbound Nazi and hugging him.
Mr Loth had said in his testimony that his mother, Helene, became pregnant with him while she was incarcerated at Stutthof.
She was transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where she gave birth to him and where he was subjected to medical experiments. Mother and son were subsequently shuttled back to Stutthof.
Previously, Mr Loth had also submitted documents to Yad Vashem, claiming that his Jewish grandmother, Anna, had been gassed to death at Stutthof.
But none of the above was true, Der
Spiegel found. He was in fact born Peter Oswald Loth on September 2, 1943 in a normal hospital in Tiegenhof, today Nowy Dwór, Gdanski — known at the time as Danzig. No medical experiments were conducted there.
His mother and grandmother, all suspect Bruno Dey covers his face; Peter Loth; Holocaust survivors Abraham Koryski and Esther Bejarano also testified written records indicate, were not Jewish but Protestant.
Helene was indeed imprisoned briefly at Stutthof, though prison records state her nationality as “R.D.”, meaning Reichsdeutsche, an ethnic German living in the German Reich.
She was held there for four weeks and released on April 1, 1943, months prior to Loth’s birth.
Mr Loth’s grandparents lived in nearby Fürstenwerder, or Zuławki today. This is where, according to an addendum to her marriage certifi