She was always hungry, says Dora Roth. Back when, as a child, she was interned with her mother in the Stutthof concentration camp. A suffering that determined her everyday life and took her mother's life: The mother starved because she gave her daughter the little bread she was given. "It was inhumane what they did to us," said survivor Dora Roth in a conversation with Deutsche Welle.
In the village of Stutthof, less than 40 kilometers from Gdansk, the National Socialists established a detention center for more than 100,000 Jews and political opponents. From 1941 it was under the aegis of the Gestapo, around 65,000 people were murdered there.
Could one as guard watch the wrong?
There was hardly any kind of killing that did not exist in Stutthof: people died by gassing, shooting, starvation, freezing, working to death, and denying medical care. Survivors described how the bodies were deposited in front of the barracks, how the shoes were made into a large pile.
Could the SS men on the 25 watchtowers of the camp overlook the injustice, the torture and the systematic murder?
newspix / imago images
Watchtower in the concentration camp Stutthof
A question that Bruno D. could answer on Thursday. From August 1944 to April 1945 he is said to have served as SS-guard in the concentration camp Stutthof his service: 1st Company of Totenkopfsturmbanns. At that time Bruno D. was 17, 18 years old. Today he is 92 and injured.
Bruno D. has to answer before the Grand Penal Chamber 17 of the Landgericht Hamburg - on charges of aiding and abetting the murder in 5230 cases. 5,000 of them by inducing and sustaining hostile conditions, 200 by gasification and 30 by a neck-blower.
The juvenile courtroom has to decide whether Bruno D. helped to destroy people by his guard duty, whether he "knowingly supported the insidious and cruel killing of Jewish prisoners in particular," as accused by the prosecution.
According to Bruno D. the escape, the revolt and the liberation of prisoners prevented. In the view of the prosecutor, he contributed as "cogs of the murder machine" in knowledge of all circumstances to "implement the killing order".
Cooperative and meaningful
Several times Bruno D. testified during interrogations by police and prosecutors, says his defender Stefan Waterkamp. He had shown cooperative and not denied to have rendered service in the concentration camp Stutthof.
Mateusz Ochocki / AFP
Ovens of the crematorium in the concentration camp Stutthof
More than 74 years after the end of the Second World War, the trial of Bruno D. starts the trial against one of many helpers who made possible the systematic murder in the extermination camps of the National Socialists. Only will a judgment also fall?
"Limited negotiable"
Bruno D. is, according to his defender, only "restricted to negotiate". Each process day is therefore scheduled for a period of two hours: "I assume a maximum attention period of 45 minutes," says lawyer Waterkamp. The court is currently planning to negotiate another 45 minutes after a break. A medical expert was on the ground to check whether and to what extent Bruno D. is still able to follow the process. "His form is very changeable," says Waterkamp.
A Hamburg expert had classified Bruno D. as unfit to stand trial. The public prosecutor's office subsequently obtained a supplementary report attesting to the 92-year-old's limited ability to negotiate.
During the process, persons in the building are prohibited from making any contact with the defendant and his family. "Any excitement for him is particularly harmful to health," says his defender. It can not be ruled out that the accredited viewers have to follow the trial by means of a video transmission. "If too many people are in the room, it could be that it adversely affects him."
The most recent processes were triggered by a change in the legal concept. German prosecutors and courts have now come to the view that supportive activities such as guard services in the legal sense are to be regarded as aiding and abetting murder. In the past, only those offenders who held high positions in the Nazi hierarchy or directly participated in killings were prosecuted.
Leading the way was the procedure before the district court Munich against John Demjanjuk. The trial of the former security guard in the Sobibor extermination camp ended in 2011 with a five-year prison sentence. The chamber certified that Demjanjuk had been "part of the extermination machine" and could not prove it to be a concrete act. The court has already assessed his service as sufficient for a conviction. However, the verdict did not become final and Demjanjuk died before the appeal against the judgment was settled.
On the other hand, the verdict against the former Auschwitz accountant Oskar Gröning was legally binding: in 2016, the Federal Court of Justice upheld the conviction for assisting the murder in 300,000 cases - a historical decision.
The case against Johann R., security guard in the concentration camp Stutthof, however, was stopped in April before the district court of Münster. A medical expert judged the 95-year-old as permanently incapacitated.
In the video (2018): Hunt for Nazi criminals - A 95-year-old before the juvenile court judge
DPA
The public prosecutor Itzehoe in Schleswig-Holstein is currently investigating a former transcriptionist of the concentration camp on suspicion of aiding and abetting murder. The 94-year-old woman worked from 1943 to 1945 in the Stutthof concentration camp.
Survivors and survivors also want to participate in the trial of Bruno D., scheduled for mid-December. A total of 28 co-plaintiffs have been admitted. For them, this historical process has a special meaning. Not only because they hope for a rule of law.
"Whoever knows about who can tell, has to do it," said the concentration camp survivor Dora Roth of Deutsche Welle. "This is the only way to prevent another holocaust."
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