A trial began Thursday for a 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard who is being charged as an accessory to thousands of murders.
Bruno Dey began working at the Stutthof concentration camp in August 1944, when he was just 17 years old, and worked there until April 1945.
Hamburg’s district court told CNN that, while the defendant was just a guard, he “could be considered complicit in the crimes because he prevented the escape, revolt and rescue of the prisoners,” according to CNN.
Due to Dey’s age, the trial sessions will be limited to two hours per day. They are currently scheduled to be held only twice a week, according to The Washington Post. Dey will also be tried in a youth court, as he was 17 when he joined the SS and became a guard at the camp.
While there is no evidence of Dey’s direct involvement in the murders that took place at the Stutthof concentration camp, he was a “small wheel in the machinery of murder” as a guard at the camp, according to prosecutors.
“The accused was no ardent worshipper of Nazi ideology,” prosecutors argued in the indictment. “But there is also no doubt that he never actively challenged the prosecutions of the Nazi regime.”
The Hamburg trial has about 20 co-plaintiffs who either spent time at Stutthof. Some are also relatives of people who spent time at the concentration camp, according to The Guardian. Among those involved Is New York filmmaker Ben Cohen, whose grandmother survived the camp. His great-grandmother died in the camp’s gas chamber, too, according to The Guardian
Cohen said his family would never fully receive justice. He said the case is an important first step, though. He also relayed his hope that Dey would testify and shine some light on how an incident like the Holocaust could take place.
“We don’t hold him accountable for everything that happened at Stutthof, but he could do a lot by talking about what went on there as a guard,” Cohen said.
Dey did reveal to prosecutors that fellow SS guards would talk about the “extermination of the Jews” and that he knew by working at the camp he had “done people wrong,” according to The Washington Post.
Witnesses in the case will fly in from America, Israel and Poland to testify. None of them are likely to remember Dey. But the trial will have a high symbolic value for those involved.
“This is not a matter of revenge,” said Markus Horstmann, a lawyer for one of the co-plaintiffs. “A trial like this is, for them, more about seeing (that) what happened to them (is) declared an injustice in a German court, and about telling their story so it doesn’t get forgotten.”