They were at the death camp at the same time. Now the survivor sees the SS guard meet his fate

They were both German teenagers when they arrived at Stutthof concentration camp within a few weeks of each other in 1944. One was a 17-year-old recruit to the SS, the other a 14-year-old Jewish boy who had already spent three years incarcerated by the Nazis.

Manfred Goldberg, now 90, doesn’t know if Bruno Dey, now 93, was one of the guards that watched his every move from a tower, ready to shoot at any sign of transgression. But he is convinced of Dey’s part in the deaths of thousands of inmates. The SS guards committed “crimes beyond description”, he told the Observer. “Atrocities of that magnitude cannot be forgotten.”

Last week, a court in Hamburg found Dey guilty of accessory to the murder of 5,232 people, mostly Jews, between August 1944 and April 1945 – almost the exact time that Goldberg spent at Stutthof and its subcamps as a slave worker. Dey was given a two-year suspended sentence.

Prosecutors argued that the SS guard was complicit in the deaths of 5,000 people who died of typhus, 200 who were gassed and 30 who were executed. In total, 65,000 people had perished at Stutthof by the time the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945.

Goldberg remembers Stutthof, in Nazi-occupied Poland, as a “brutal place” but one that was disciplined and relatively well organised when he arrived on 9 August 1944. The boy had long been stripped of his name; instead he was known by a number seared into his memory: 54648.

By the end of that year, the camp was descending into chaos as allied forces advanced. “I had no idea what was happening, we had no access to information, but the deterioration in the way the camp was run was a reflection of the way the war was going,” he said. “It changed from being a brutal camp into an extermination camp.”

Trainloads of Jews from other camps arrived daily. Most were sent to gas chambers; those that weren’t were starving and ill. The population of the camp doubled. Inmates were forced to exist in inhumane and grossly unhygienic conditions, and were denied access to food, clean water and medication.

“Not a single night passed without one or more people dying from starvation or sickness,” said Goldberg.

His little brother had already “disappeared off the face of the earth” and he was separated from his mother, who was in the women’s camp. By a stroke of luck she survived, but Goldberg estimates that close to 100 members of his extended family were killed in the Holocaust. Goldberg came to the UK in September 1946 to be reunited with his father.

He returned to Stutthof for the first time three years ago, accompanying the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. “I didn’t know if I could face it,” he said. “It was an extraordinarily emotional experience.”

He was glad to see Dey’s conviction last week but was critical of his sentence. “It’s insulting. I’m not advocating that he should serve [time] in prison, but he should have received a symbolic sentence. Two years suspended is what you get for shoplifting.

“But the major plus is that [Dey’s trial] established beyond doubt that these atrocities took place. Today, there are people who believe that the Holocaust is a hoax, a Jewish fairytale to gain the sympathy of the world. But it did take place, and the court confirmed this.”

In a statement to the court, Dey said witness accounts had “for the first time made me fully aware of the extent of cruelty and suffering”. He apologised “to those who went through this hellish madness and their relatives. Something like this must never be repeated.”

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: “The passage of time is no barrier to justice when it comes to the heinous crimes of the Holocaust. Stutthof was infamous for its cruelty and suffering, with survivors calling it ‘hell on earth’. Tragically, the victims of the Holocaust did not have the luxury of growing old or having families, as this perpetrator did.”