Conviction may mark end of era
BERLIN— A German court convicted a 93-year-old man Thursday for helping the Nazis murder thousands of people while he served as a concentration camp guard more than 75 years ago, in what might be one of the last verdicts to be handed down to a living participant in the Holocaust.
The Hamburg state court found Bruno Dey guilty of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder — one for each person believed to have been killed in the Stutthof concentration camp, east of Gdansk in Poland, during the time he served as a guard there, from August 1944 to April1945. More than 60,000 people are believed to have died or been killed at the camp.
Dey, who was tried in juvenile court because he was only 17 years old at the time, was given a two-year suspended sentence, reflecting the prosecutors’ acknowledgment of his contrition and willingness to co-operate with authorities.
But survivors and those representing them criticized the sentence as too lenient.
“It is unsatisfactory and much too late,” said Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee, who followed the trial. “What is so upsetting for survivors is that this defendant failed to use the many postwar years of his life to reflect on what he saw and heard.”
The trial against Dey was the latest in a push by prosecutors in the special office for handling Nazi-era crimes to bring aging suspects to justice before it is too late. And it came at a moment when the country is struggling to deal with a resurgence in right-wing extremism.
Dey appeared at the Hamburg state court, seated in a wheelchair and wearing a blue surgical mask because of the coronavirus outbreak. He cast his eyes downward as the judge read his sentence, according to German public media.
“You still see yourself as a mere observer, when in fact you were an accomplice to this man-made hell,” presiding judge Anne Meier-Goering told the defendant while reading the verdict. “You did not follow an order to carry out a crime and should not have inferred this.”
In a closing statement, Dey said he felt it was important to express his thoughts and feelings about what he had learned during the trial but also argued that he had been forced to serve as a concentration camp SS guard and was ordered into the position.
“The witness testimony and the expert assessments made me realize the full scope of the horrors and suffering,” he told the court.
“Today I would like to apologize for those who went through the hell of this insanity. Something like this must never happen again.”
German authorities have intensified their efforts in recent years to hold to account men and women, most of them now older than 90, who played smaller roles in helping the Nazis round up and murder Europe’s Jews in their network of concentration and death camps.