An elderly former SS guard has been convicted of being complicit in the murders of thousands at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Bruno Dey, 93, was convicted and sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence on Thursday. His trial began in October, although there were limitations in place given his age. Prior to his sentence, Dey offered an apology to the victims of Stutthof concentration camp, although he denied that he was responsible for the deaths.
“Today, I would like to apologize to those who went through the hell of this madness, as well as to their relatives. Something like this must never happen again,” Dey said.
“I would like to stress again that I would never have voluntarily signed up to the SS or any other unit — especially not in a concentration camp,” he continued. “If I had seen an opportunity to remove myself from service, I would have done so.”
Dey, who was found to be complicit in the murders of at least 5,232 people, was charged in Hamburg juvenile court, given that he was just 17 when he began working as a tower guard at Stutthof. Some 65,000 people were killed in total at the camp. More than 40 co-plaintiffs from all over the world testified against Dey during the trial.
Ben Cohen, whose grandmother spent time as a prisoner at Stutthof, called the sentence “symbolic justice.”
“On behalf of my grandmother and our family, this verdict sends a powerful message that a guard in any camp cannot deny responsibility for what happened,” Cohen told CNN in a statement. “Unfortunately, most perpetrators of the Holocaust were never prosecuted, and so we are left with something that feels like symbolic justice today rather than true justice.”
Another former Stutthof concentration camp guard, a 95-year-old man, was charged with being complicit in the deaths of hundreds earlier this month.
