Former SS Nazi Concentration Camp Guard Convicted In Germany: Stutthof
Last edited Thu Jul 23, 2020, 07:08 AM - Edit history (3)
'Former concentration camp guard convicted in Germany.' By David Rising, July 23, 2020, Associated Press. - Excerpts:
BERLIN (AP) — A German court on Thursday convicted a 93-year-old former SS private of being an accessory to murder at the Stutthof concentration camp, where he served as a guard in the final months of World War II. Bruno Dey was given a two-year suspended sentence by the Hamburg state court, news agency dpa reported. He was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945, and one count of accessory to attempted murder. Because he was only 17, and later 18, at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey’s case was heard in juvenile court. Prosecutors had called for a three-year sentence and the defense for an acquittal.
“How could you get used to the horror?” presiding judge Anne Meier-Goering asked as she announced the verdict.
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. Because he was only 17, and later 18, at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey’s case was heard in juvenile court. Prosecutors had called for a three-year sentence, while the defense demanded acquittal. 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.
..The Dey case extends the argument to apply to a guard at a concentration camp that did not exist for the sole purpose of extermination, rather than a death camp guard. Prosecutors argued that as a Stutthof guard from August 1944 to April 1945, Dey — although “no ardent worshipper of Nazi ideology” — aided all the killings that took place there during that period as a “small wheel in the machinery of murder.” Dey gave wide-ranging statements to investigators about his service, saying that he was deemed unfit for combat in the regular Germany army in 1944 so was drafted into an SS guard detachment and sent to the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk..As a camp guard, he said he frequently was directed to watch over prisoner labor crews working outside the camp. Dey acknowledged hearing screams from the camp’s gas chambers and watching as corpses were taken to be burned, but he said he never fired his weapon and once allowed a group to smuggle meat from a dead horse they’d discovered back into the camp. “The images of misery and horror have haunted me my entire life,” he testified.
Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called “work education camp” where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died. Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah’s Witnesses. From mid-1944, when Dey was posted there, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising. More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure, or were put to death in a gas chamber...
https://apnews.com/48760750c400b329e6540b6742804621
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- Former SS Nazi guard convicted in Germany's 'last' Holocaust trial, DW
https://www.dw.com/en/nazi-holocaust-stutthof-trial/a-54274225
..In January, Johan Solberg, a 97-year-old former Stutthof prisoner from Norway, testified in Hamburg that he had witnessed eleven executions personally, including the hanging of children, and watched around 100 prisoners a day, mostly Jews, being sent to the gas chambers...
The Stutthof concentration camp was the first to be established by the Nazi regime outside Germany's borders, and one of the last to be liberated. Situated near Sztutowo, a small town about 20 miles east of Gdansk, northern Poland, it was already operational as a prison camp a day after the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.
Over the next six years, between 63,000 and 65,000 people, including 28,000 Jews, are thought to have lost their lives in Stutthof, either from epidemics, brutal working conditions, lack of medical attention, or executions and murder. Gas chambers were used at the camp after 1944, and many more prisoners lost their lives during the death marches towards the end of the war.
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All the leaders of these death camps should have been put on trial right after the war. I'm not talking about just the top Nazi's that were tried in Nuremberg. 
