Ex-Stutthof Concentration Camp Guard Bruno Dey Sentenced for WW II Crimes

BERLIN, KOMPAS.com - A 93-year-old former SS private as the Stutthof concentration camp has been handed a two-year suspended sentence in Germany.

The former officer, Bruno Dey, was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder by the Hamburg State Court, according to reports by agency DPA.

Bruno served as a guard in the final months of World War II.

His conviction of 5,232 counts is equal to the number of people believed to have been murdered at Stuffhof concentration camp during Bruno Dey’s service in 1944-1945.

The then-SS private was additionally convicted of one count of accessory to attempted murder.

“How could you get used to the horror?” presiding judge Anne Meier-Goering asked as she announced the verdict.

Bruno Dey was 17 and later 18 years of age at the time of his alleged crimes, hence his case was heard in juvenile court.

The defense demanded acquittal while prosecutors demanded a three-year sentence.

The trial opened in October, and in deference to Dey’s age, court sessions were limited to two, two-hour sessions a week.

Additional precautions also were taken to keep the case going through the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a closing statement to the court earlier this week, the wheelchair-bound German retiree 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 said.

For at least two decades, every trial of a former Nazi has been dubbed “likely Germany’s last.”

But just last week, another ex-guard at Stutthof was charged at age 95, and the special prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi-era crimes has more than a dozen ongoing investigations.

That’s due in part to a precedent established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland.