German court convicts 93-year-old man for Nazi crimes

Dey has admitted that he served at the camp and had knowledge of what took place, but has denied any complicity in the deaths of inmates - claiming that he never bought into the Nazi ideology.

JULY 23, 2020 13:22

Updated: JULY 23, 2020 18:33

'Death Gate' at Stutthof Concentration Camp (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons) — 'Death Gate' at Stutthof Concentration Camp

(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

A German court convicted a 93-year-old German man of helping to murder 5,232 prisoners, many Jewish, at a Nazi concentration camp in World War Two and handed him a suspended two-year sentence in one of the last cases against Nazi-era crimes.

Bruno Dey, who had been an SS guard in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk in what is today Poland, was guilty of being involved in killings between August 1944 and April 1945, the Hamburg court said on Thursday.

Dey has admitted that he served at the camp and had knowledge of what took place, but has denied any complicity in the deaths of inmates – claiming that he never bought into the Nazi ideology.

"I don't bear any guilt for what happened back then," the defendant told the Hamburg court last year, according to the international public broadcaster. "I didn't contribute anything to it, other than standing guard. But I was forced to do it; it was an order."

“I probably knew that these were Jews who hadn’t committed a crime, that they were only in here because they were Jews,” Dey said before his trial evaluation last year, according to the German newspaper Die Welt. “And they have a right to live and work freely like every other human being.”

During closing arguments earlier this month, prosecutors claimed that the former guard was aware of the war crimes being committed at the Nazi death camp but chose not to act, or take the option of stepping down from his guard tower to proclaim that he "can't do this anymore."

"When you are a part of a mass-murder machinery, it is not enough to look away," prosecutor Lars Mahnke said in his closing arguments.

Dey began his service with the SS-Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion) at the age of 17 and guarded the watchtowers of Stutthof until age 18. He was therefore being tried by a juvenile court, despite his current age.

The defendant was specifically being charged for being an accessory to the murder of over 5,000 people at Stutthof during World War II, with prosecutors adding that he forcefully kept people as prisoners and was involved in the suppression of prisoner revolts.

He claims that he was stationed at Stutthof due to a heart condition, which impeded him from serving on the front lines. The defense team also notes that if it weren't for the "broader" crimes of the Nazi regime, he would have never been connected to the war crimes, according to DW.

“I probably knew that these were Jews who hadn’t committed a crime, that they were only in here because they were Jews,” Dey said before his trial evaluation last year, according to the German newspaper Die Welt. “And they have a right to live and work freely like every other human being.”

In his final testimony to the court earlier this week, Dey apologized for the suffering victims went through but stopped short of taking responsibility, German media reported.

"I would like to apologize to all the people who have gone through this hell of insanity and to their relatives and survivors," he told the court this week, broadcaster NDR and many other media outlets reported.

Dey began his service with the SS-Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion) at the age of 17 and guarded the watchtowers of Stutthof until age 18. He is therefore being tried by a juvenile court, despite his current age.

Although the number of suspects is dwindling due to old age, prosecutors are still trying to bring individuals to justice. A landmark conviction in 2011 opened the way to more prosecutions as it was the first time that working in a camp was sufficient grounds for culpability, with no proof of a specific crime.

Antisemitism watchdog organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center released a statement praising Dey's conviction, but criticized the decision to give him a suspended sentence, which they called "an insult to the survivors."

"This is a classic case of misplaced sympathy syndrome," the center's chief Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff explained. "Instead of validating the suffering of the survivors in Stutthof by punishing the perpetrator, the judges insulted them by sending Dey home, happy that he will not be punished at all.

"The fact that not a single one of the four Nazi war criminals convicted during the past decade, since the change in German prosecution policy (which started with the Demjanjuk case) has sat one day in jail, is a serious taint on the judicial process."

Stutthof opened in September 1939, initially to detain Polish political prisoners. It was the first Nazi camp set up outside German borders during the Second World War. Stutthof was also the last camp liberated by the Allies on May 9, 1945.

Some 63,000 people reportedly died at Stutthof during World War II, including 28,000 Jews.

Alex Winston and Aaron Reich contributed to this report.