'Shaken' ex-Nazi camp guard, 93, gets two-year suspended sentence
A 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp
guard was handed a suspended sentence of two years in prison on Thursday as a
court in Hamburg found him guilty of complicity in WWII atrocities.
In what could be one of the last such cases of surviving Nazi guards, Bruno
Dey was convicted for his role in the killing of 5,230 people when he was a
teenaged SS tower guard at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk, in Poland.
Bruno Dey was convicted for his role in the murder of 5,232 people when he
was a teenaged SS tower guard at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig,
now Gdansk, in Poland.
Judge Anne Meier-Göring said Dey had helped to "dehumanise human beings and turn them into numbers".
READ ALSO: German concentration camp guard 'sorry for what he did'
"You still see yourself as a mere observer, when in fact you were an accomplice to this manmade hell," she told him as she handed down the sentence, also for one case of attempted murder.
In his last statements to the court, Dey had apologised to victims but stressed that he had been forced into his role at the camp.
"Today I would like to apologise to those who went through the hell of this
madness, as well as to their relatives. Something like this must never happen
again," he said from the dock.
He said he was "shaken" by witness accounts from Stutthof, where tens of
thousands of people died from illness, malnutrition and murder by gas chamber
and surprise execution.
But he added that he became aware of the "extent of the atrocities" only upon hearing witness testimonies and reports.
Chief prosecutor Lars Mahnke had demanded a three-year prison sentence for
Dey, saying he knew about the "state-organised mass murder" happening around
him and should have climbed down from the tower and handed in his weapon.
Dey's defence lawyer Stefan Waterkamp had sought an acquittal or a
suspended sentence.
Visitors to the Stutthof camp. Photo: DPA
'No escape'
Dey was given a juvenile sentence because he was 17 or 18 years old when he
served at the camp between April 1944 and April 1945.
Waterkamp, his lawyer, had argued that such a young man could hardly have
been expected to break ranks, and that the teenaged Dey "saw no escape".
He added that as a tower guard, Dey would not have known the extent of the
"sadism" and "inhumane conditions" of the camp.
Dey acknowledged last year that he had been aware of the camp's gas
chambers and admitted seeing "emaciated figures, people who had suffered", but
insisted he was not guilty even if he expressed regret over the atrocities.
One Stutthof survivor dismissed Dey's apology.
"I'm speechless. I don't want his apology, I don't need it," Marek
Dunin-Wasowicz, a 93-year-old camp survivor, told AFP via telephone from his
home in Warsaw.
65,000 deaths
The Nazis set up the Stutthof camp in 1939, initially using it to detain Polish political prisoners.
But it ended up holding 110,000 detainees, including many Jews.
Some 65,000 people perished in the camp, around 4,000 of them murdered in
the gas chambers.
Dey, who now lives in Hamburg, became a baker after the war.
Married with two daughters, he supplemented his income by working as a truck driver, before later taking a job in building maintenance.
He came into prosecutors' sights after a landmark 2011 ruling against
former Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk on the basis that he was part of the
Nazi killing machine.
READ ALSO: 'This must never happen again': Ex-Nazi guard apologises to Holocaust victims
Since then, Germany has been racing to use that legal precedent against surviving SS personnel rather than trying to find evidence that they directly
committed murders or atrocities.
Courts have since convicted Oskar Gröning, an accountant at Auschwitz, and
Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at the same camp, for complicity in mass
murder.
Both men were found guilty at the age of 94 but died before they could be
imprisoned.
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In what could be one of the last such cases of surviving Nazi guards, Bruno
Dey was convicted for his role in the killing of 5,230 people when he was a
teenaged SS tower guard at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk, in Poland.
Bruno Dey was convicted for his role in the murder of 5,232 people when he
was a teenaged SS tower guard at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig,
now Gdansk, in Poland.
Judge Anne Meier-Göring said Dey had helped to "dehumanise human beings and turn them into numbers".
READ ALSO: German concentration camp guard 'sorry for what he did'
"You still see yourself as a mere observer, when in fact you were an accomplice to this manmade hell," she told him as she handed down the sentence, also for one case of attempted murder.
In his last statements to the court, Dey had apologised to victims but stressed that he had been forced into his role at the camp.
"Today I would like to apologise to those who went through the hell of this
madness, as well as to their relatives. Something like this must never happen
again," he said from the dock.
He said he was "shaken" by witness accounts from Stutthof, where tens of
thousands of people died from illness, malnutrition and murder by gas chamber
and surprise execution.
But he added that he became aware of the "extent of the atrocities" only upon hearing witness testimonies and reports.
Chief prosecutor Lars Mahnke had demanded a three-year prison sentence for
Dey, saying he knew about the "state-organised mass murder" happening around
him and should have climbed down from the tower and handed in his weapon.
Dey's defence lawyer Stefan Waterkamp had sought an acquittal or a
suspended sentence.
Visitors to the Stutthof camp. Photo: DPA
'No escape'
Dey was given a juvenile sentence because he was 17 or 18 years old when he
served at the camp between April 1944 and April 1945.
Waterkamp, his lawyer, had argued that such a young man could hardly have
been expected to break ranks, and that the teenaged Dey "saw no escape".
He added that as a tower guard, Dey would not have known the extent of the
"sadism" and "inhumane conditions" of the camp.
Dey acknowledged last year that he had been aware of the camp's gas
chambers and admitted seeing "emaciated figures, people who had suffered", but
insisted he was not guilty even if he expressed regret over the atrocities.
One Stutthof survivor dismissed Dey's apology.
"I'm speechless. I don't want his apology, I don't need it," Marek
Dunin-Wasowicz, a 93-year-old camp survivor, told AFP via telephone from his
home in Warsaw.
65,000 deaths
The Nazis set up the Stutthof camp in 1939, initially using it to detain Polish political prisoners.
But it ended up holding 110,000 detainees, including many Jews.
Some 65,000 people perished in the camp, around 4,000 of them murdered in
the gas chambers.
Dey, who now lives in Hamburg, became a baker after the war.
Married with two daughters, he supplemented his income by working as a truck driver, before later taking a job in building maintenance.
He came into prosecutors' sights after a landmark 2011 ruling against
former Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk on the basis that he was part of the
Nazi killing machine.
READ ALSO: 'This must never happen again': Ex-Nazi guard apologises to Holocaust victims
Since then, Germany has been racing to use that legal precedent against surviving SS personnel rather than trying to find evidence that they directly
committed murders or atrocities.
Courts have since convicted Oskar Gröning, an accountant at Auschwitz, and
Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at the same camp, for complicity in mass
murder.
Both men were found guilty at the age of 94 but died before they could be
imprisoned.
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