Ex-guard, 93, guilty in Nazi-camp deaths

BERLIN — A German court on Thursday convicted a 93-year-old former SS private of being an accessory to murder at the Stutthof concentration camp, where he served as a guard in the final months of World War II. He was given a two-year suspended sentence.

Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder by the Hamburg state court, news agency dpa reported. That is equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945. He also was convicted as an accessory to attempted murder.

“How could you get used to the horror?” presiding Judge Anne Meier-Goering asked as she announced the verdict. She said that the fact Dey was taking orders didn’t free him from guilt.

Because he was 17 and 18 at the time of his crimes, Dey’s case was heard in juvenile court. Prosecutors had called for a three-year sentence, while the defense sought acquittal.

The judge said that, while Dey should have tried to avoid service at Stutthof, the sentence was appropriate to his guilt.

“You were not yet grown up then, still so young in a time when a lack of conscience had seized a whole people as never before,” Meier-Goering said.

In a closing statement earlier this week, the German retiree, who uses a wheelchair, apologized for his role in the Nazis’ machinery of destruction, saying “it must never be repeated.”

“Today, I want to apologize to all of the people who went through this hellish insanity,” Dey told the court. “The images of misery and horror have haunted me my entire life,” he testified.