Former Nazi camp guard, 93, convicted in Germany, gets suspended sentence

Bruno Dey, a teenaged SS tower guard at the Stutthof camp in Poland, was convicted for his role in the murder of 5,232 people

He admitted he was aware of the camp’s gas chambers and saw emaciated figures, but insisted he was not guilty, and apologised to the victims

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A 93-year-old German man who was accused of being an SS guard involved in the killings of thousands of prisoners in the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp in Poland in 1944 and 1945, was convicted in a Hamburg court on July 23. Photo: Reuters

Published: 7:36pm, 23 Jul 2020Updated: 7:41pm, 23 Jul 2020

A 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard was handed a suspended sentence of two years by a German court on Thursday for complicity in World War II atrocities, in what could be one of the last such cases of surviving SS guards.

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-Goering said Dey had helped to “dehumanise human beings and turn them into numbers”.

“You still see yourself as a mere observer, when in fact you were an accomplice to this man-made hell,” she told him as she handed down the sentence, also for one case of attempted murder.

Former SS camp guard Bruno Dey is convicted in the Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany. Photo: EPA-EFE

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.