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Germany: prison required in one of the latest Nazi trials

2020-07-07T10:19:30.386Z


Three years in prison have been demanded against a former SS concentration camp guard tried in Germany in one of the most recent trials of


In April 1944 and April 1945, Bruno Dey was an SS guard at the Stutthof camp, located 40 km from the city of Gdansk, today in Poland. He was 17 years old. Now 93, he has been on trial in Hamburg since October for complicity in the murder of 5,230 prisoners, 5,000 of whom by "creating and maintaining life-threatening conditions", 200 by gassing and 30 of a bullet in the neck.

Prosecutor Lars Mahnke said "there is no doubt" about the accused's guilt. According to him, the latter "acted intentionally". The prosecutor requested a three-year prison sentence. The verdict will be released on July 23.

Today retired baker, pushed into a wheelchair by a nurse, the man did not deny during this trial, one of the last on the atrocities of the Nazis, to have been a guard but explained to have been forced to work on it.

"I do not feel guilty about what happened at the time," he said on May 20 during a hearing. His lawyers claim that he did not voluntarily join the SS in the camp but was assigned there because his health did not allow him to be mobilized at the front.

An "organized massacre"

But for the prosecutor, the accused participated in a "genocide", in a "massacre organized by the State" from which he had the choice to escape by "coming down from the tower, handing over his rifle and declaring that he couldn't continue. "

Created in 1939, this first camp built outside of Germany was gradually enlarged under the responsibility of the SS. Some 115,000 deportees were imprisoned there, 65,000 of whom died, according to the Yad Vashem Memorial.

From 1944, he counted many Jews, mainly women from the Baltic countries and Poland transferred from other camps, including Auschwitz. The site had a gas chamber, had approximately 3,000 Ukrainian SS guards and auxiliaries.

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Executions were frequent there and the camp was designed so that "no one can get out of it". Even the workloads were ultimately meant to "wipe out," according to the attorney general.

In recent years, Germany has tried and convicted several former SS for complicity in murder, illustrating the late severity of its justice, accused of having long closed their eyes.

Prosecutors and German courts have extended to the guards of camps the count of complicity in murder, previously reserved for people who occupied high positions in the Nazi hierarchy or directly involved. None of these convicts has so far gone to prison, on account of their state of health.

The most emblematic case was the proceedings against John Demjanjuk. A former guardian of the Sobibor extermination camp, in 2011 he was sentenced to five years in prison. He died in 2012 before his appeal trial. There are still around twenty such cases under investigation, a dozen of which concern the Sachsenhausen camp alone.

Source: leparis

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