A 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard has been convicted of being an accessory to murder in what could be one of the last WWII Nazi trials in history.
CNN reports that the man, identified as only Bruno D, has been charged with 5,230 counts of accessory to murder. He was an SS guard at the Stutthof concentration camp from 1944 to 1945. The Hamburg juvenile court found him guilty of aiding and abetting in the murder of at least 5,232 people, facing the charges in juvenile court because he was only 17 when he served in the SS. At the camp where he was stationed, approximately 110,000 people were held, while it is estimated between 63,000 to 65,000 people were killed there.
While he previously admitted that he had been a guard at the camp, he argued he wasn't given a choice at the time. He grew up in a village near the Polish city of Gdansk, known as Danzig at the time he lived there. Over 40 individuals from France, Israel, Poland, and the United States testified against him during the trial, which had been ongoing since October 2019.
Bruno D was convicted of thousands of counts of being an accessory to murder, and was given a two-year suspended prison sentence. Court documents allege that SS guards at the concentration camp had killed inmates by shooting them in the back of the neck, poisoning, and starvation among other methods. The verdict arrives just a week after a man accused of being a guard at the same Stutthof concentration camp was charged with war crimes during the Holocaust.
