Ex-Nazi Camp Guard, 93, Convicted in Germany
World
Asharq Al-Awsat
A court in Hamburg on Thursday convicted a 93-year-old German man of helping murder 5,232 prisoners, many of them Jewish, at a Nazi concentration camp in World War II and handed him a suspended sentence of two years. In one of the last cases against Nazi-era crimes, Bruno D. was an SS guard in the Stutthof concentration camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk, in Poland, and found guilty of being involved in killings between August 1944 and April 1945. Judge Anne Meier-Goering said Bruno D. had helped to "dehumanize human beings and turn them into numbers". "You still see yourself as a mere observer, when in fact you were an accomplice to this manmade hell," she told him as she handed down the sentence, also for one case of attempted murder. He had acknowledged his presence at the camp but argued that did not amount to guilt. He said he was "shaken" by witness accounts from Stutthof, where tens of thousands of people died from illness, malnutrition and murder by gas chamber and surprise execution. But he added that he became aware of the "extent of the atrocities" only upon hearing witness testimonies and reports. As he was only 17 or 18 years old at the time of the crimes, he was subject to youth sentencing guidelines. Under German rules for court cases, the suspect's full name is not published.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2406811/ex-nazi-camp-guard-93-convicted-germany
No comments:
Post a Comment