Yahoo News 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard to go on trial in Germany
A former Nazi concentration camp guard will go on trial in the German city of Hamburg this week.
The 93-year-old man, named only as Bruno D in the German media, is accused as an accessory to the murder of 5,230 people at Stutthof concentration camp in Poland between August 1944 and April 1945.
He will go on trial in Hamburg on Thursday in what could be one of the last criminal cases where an individual is charged over the Holocaust, according to the Guardian.
Bruno D was 17 when he joined the SS-Totenkopfsturmbann, which manned watchtowers at the concentration camp near what is now the city of Gdansk.
The accused guard has reportedly cooperated with the investigators by allowing himself to be interviewed eight times.
In the interviews, Bruno D confessed to having heard screams and was aware of the nature of the killings, German newspaper Die Welt reported.
“I probably knew that these were Jews who hadn’t committed a crime, that they were only in here because they were Jews,” he said, according to the publication.
But he added that he thought they had a “right to live and work freely like every other human being”.
Bruno D reportedly does not believe he is guilty of being an accessory to murder.
“What use would it have been if I had left. They would have found someone else,” the newspaper quoted him saying.
He also claimed that he was unable to go into battle because of a heart condition so he worked as a guard.
He stands accused of having been an accessory to murder for 5,000 people who died from typhus which spread through the camp due to prisoners being starved and denied access to medication.
A further 200 people were gassed with Zyklon B and 30 people were executed with a device specially built for killing with a shot in the neck.
A doctor has declared him mentally fit for a trial but each court session has been scheduled to last no more than two hours.
The trial has about 20 co-plaintiffs who spent time at Stutthof.
Four are former members of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), the dominant resistance movement in Poland, and two are women who fought in the Warsaw uprising.
