Former Nazi camp guard, 92, is healthy enough to face trial, German court rules

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(JTA) — A former Nazi concentration camp guard, now 92, is in good enough health to go on trial as an accessory to murder, a Hamburg court ruled.

The SS guard, identified in the German media as Bruno Dey, was charged in April with aiding and abetting the deaths of 5,230 prisoners at  Stutthof during the nine months he served in a watch tower at the camp in Poland.

His trial, set to begin in October, will be one of the last for former Nazis.

Health experts said the sessions must be limited to two hours a day, The Associated Press reported. He will be tried by a juvenile court in Hamburg because he was 17 when he began at Stutthof.

Dey worked at the camp near Gdansk, then known as Danzig, between August 1944 and April 1945. According to the Die Welt newspaper, he admitted to prosecutors during questioning last year that he served at Stutthof and had seen people being taken to gas chambers, where he knew they would be murdered.

He told prosecutors, according to Die Welt, that he is not guilty because anyone could have filled the position.

“What good would it have done for me to leave? They’d just have found somebody else,” he reportedly said. “I felt bad for the people there. I didn’t know why they were there. I knew that they were Jews who had committed no crime.”

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