93-year-old former Nazi guard found guilty of mass murder at Stutthof concentration camp

Former concentration camp guard found guilty of complicity in the murder of 5,232 people, in one of the last trials of its kind.

Prosecutors have handed 93-year-old former SS security guard, Bruno Dey, a two-year suspended sentence after being charged as an accessory to the murder of 5,230 people. Picture: Getty

A 93-year-old former SS guard has been given a two-year suspended sentence for complicity in the murder of 5,232 people at a concentration camp in one of the last trials of its kind.

Bruno Dey denied he had any choice or that he was aware of the mass murder in Stutthof near what is now Gdansk, Poland. However, in a statement to his trial in Hamburg this week, the former caretaker apologised to the victims who had gone through the “hell of insanity” and to their descendants.

“It was only through the reports of the witnesses and the expert opinions that I became aware of the full extent of the cruelty and suffering,” Dey said. He said he had been forced to serve in a watchtower and would never have volunteered to join the SS, “especially not in a concentration camp”.

The gas chamber in former Nazi Death Camp Stutthof, in Sztutowo, Poland. Picture: AFP

Forty co-plaintiffs attended the trial, including 35 survivors, some of whom said they did not want Dey, who uses a wheelchair, to be jailed. His punishment was subject to youth sentencing guidelines because he was 17 when he joined the camp guard in August 1944. He was there until April 1945.

The sentence was below the three-year term demanded by prosecutors, who argued that Dey could have had himself reassigned. The trial was closely watched because an acquittal would have had implications for 14 other cases against former guards at Nazi camps.

Marek Dunin-Wasowicz – Nazi death camp survivor and witness in the trial of Bruno Dey. The pyres of burning bodies in the forests around Nazi Germany's Stutthof concentration camp still haunt the 93-year-old. Picture: AFP

German courts have convicted more than 6,600 Nazi war criminals since 1947 but most sentences amounted to less than one year in jail. A historic ruling against John Demjanjuk, a former guard at Sobibor death camp who was convicted in 2011, set a precedent for courts to convict lower-ranking staff on the grounds that their mere presence in camps was enough to make them accessories to murder. Demjanjuk appealed against the verdict but died aged 91 in 2012 before the case could be heard.

About 65,000 prisoners, 28,000 of them Jews, died at Stutthof through overwork, torture, starvation, disease, medical neglect and murder by firearms or gas. The camp was the first to be set up by the Nazis outside Germany.

Rosa Bloch, a survivor who gave evidence against Dey, said: “I accuse the people who guarded us and I will never forgive them.”

The Times