Former Nazi concentration guard sentenced, accomplice in the death of 5232 people

Time erases many things but does not erase the memory of those who want to remember. And it is in this spirit that, 75 years after the end of the war, the trial of the former SS guard of the Stutthof concentration camp ended with a sentence from the Hamburg court.
The Hanseatic city court recognized Bruno Dey, at the time of the facts a 17 year old boy and today a 93 year old elder, guilty of having contributed with his vigilance to the death of 5,232 people in the Nazi concentration camp near Gdansk. The two-year prison sentence, imposed according to the jurisdiction that applies to minors, will be served on probation given the age of the accused. A decision severely contested by the Wiesenthal center in Jerusalem that spoke of an "insult to the survivors".
While welcoming the sentencing, the director of the center, Efraim Zuroff, stressed that it is "a classic example of misplaced sympathy syndrome. Instead of validating the survivors' suffering by punishing the culprit, the judges insulted them by sending Dey home , happy to be completely unpunished ". "The fact that not one of the 4 Nazi war criminals convicted in the past decade has made a single day in prison is - he concluded - a serious stain in the judicial process".
Returning to the Hamburg trial, Judge Anne Meier-Goering stressed that Dey "should not have obeyed criminal orders". At the end of a trial that lasted 44 hearings, the defendant had taken the floor on Monday: "today I would like to apologize to those who have had to go through this hell of madness and their family members" he said before the attorney's final plea defender "such a thing must never happen again". At the beginning of the trial, Dey had said he was amazed at the accusations and declared that he did not understand the charges, as a surveillance officer and not a direct perpetrator of the crimes committed. But in the final statements, the turnaround: the elderly man declared that he had finally caught the horror of what had happened only through the testimonies of the families of the victims and survivors.