Lars Mahnke, Attorney General, poses before a hearing in Bruno Dey’s trial (AFP)
Hamburg:
A 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard apologized to Holocaust victims on Monday in a Hamburg court, ahead of the much-publicized trial verdict for his complicity in World War II atrocities.
“Today, I would like to apologize to those who went through hell for this madness, as well as to their loved ones. Something like that must never happen again,” Bruno Dey said from the platform.
In what may be one of the last cases of surviving Nazi guards, Dey is accused of being an accomplice in the murder of 5,230 people when he worked as an SS tower guard at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig today. hui Gdansk in Poland.
The court is expected to give its verdict on Thursday.
Prosecutors demanded three years in prison for the 93-year-old man.
But in his summary on Monday, Dey’s defense attorney Stefan Waterkamp asked the court for an acquittal or a suspended sentence, saying his client “would not survive” in prison.
Dey himself denied any guilt for what happened at the camp and said the trial “cost a lot of force.”
“I would like to emphasize again that I would never have voluntarily enlisted with the SS or any other unit – especially not in a concentration camp,” he said in his final statements before the court handed down his verdict. .
“If I had seen an opportunity to retire from service, I would have.”
He added that he only became aware of “the extent of the atrocities” by hearing testimonies and witness reports.
– “Inhuman conditions” –
Dey is on trial in juvenile court because he was between 17 and 18 at the time.
Waterkamp, his lawyer, stressed that a young man could hardly be expected to leave the ranks and that the adolescent Dey “saw no way out”.
He added that as a simple tower keeper, Dey would not have known the extent of the camp’s “sadism” and “inhuman conditions”.
Waterkamp also said that the Nazi crimes were “incomprehensible” and that the witness statements had “severely shaken” his client.
The Nazis set up the Stutthof camp in 1939, initially using it to hold Polish political prisoners.
But he ended up detaining 110,000 detainees, including many Jews. Some 65,000 people died in the camp.
Dey, who now lives in Hamburg, became a baker after the war.
Married and father of two daughters, he supplemented his income by working as a truck driver, before taking up a job in building maintenance.
He entered the crosshairs of prosecutors after a historic decision rendered in 2011 against former Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk on the grounds that he was part of the Nazi killing machine.
Since then, Germany has struggled to try surviving SS personnel on these grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly related to the accused.
Another former Stutthof camp guard, now 95, was charged last week with aiding and abetting the murder of several hundred people.
The Wuppertal District Court will have to determine with the help of experts whether the accused in this case is fit for trial.
(This story has not been edited by GalacticGaming staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
