A former guard at a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted on more than 5,000 counts in one of the last ever cases of its kind.
93-year-old Bruno Dey, who was an SS guard at the Stutthof concentration camp during World War II, on Thursday was found guilty of aiding and abetting 5,232 murders and received a two-year suspended sentence, CNN reports. He was 17 when he was a guard at the camp, and so the case was tried in juvenile court in Hamburg.
“The concentration camp Stutthof and the mass murder that took place inside was only able to take place with your help,” the judge said, per The Guardian. Dey had apologized in court “to those who went through this hellish madness and their relatives,” also saying that “something like this must never be repeated.”
This, The Guardian writes, was “hailed as potentially the last criminal case of an individual charged over the Holocaust,” though another Stutthof guard may reportedly go on trial soon, and according to The Associated Press, “a special prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi-era crimes has more than a dozen ongoing investigations.”
