93-year-old ex-Nazi guard Bruno Dey convicted of 5,232 murders, gets 2-year suspended prison sentence

A 93-year-old German man was convicted for helping to murder  5,232 prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He was given a suspended two-year sentence in what is considered to be one of the last cases of crimes committed during the Nazi era.

In the courtroom, Bruno Dey confessed that he was an SS guard in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland. He, however, argued that just his presence at the concentration camp did not mean that he was guilty.

As he was wheeled into the courtroom, Bruno hid his face behind a blue folder as he revisited his role in one of the darkest periods of human history.

However, the court was not happy with his argument which found him guilty of the killings from August 1944 to April 1945. He was convicted of his crime on July 23.

How could you get used to the horror?" asked judge Anne Meier-Goering as she read the verdict.

In his final testimony, he apologised for the suffering caused to the victims of the holocaust.

"I would like to apologise to all the people who have gone through this hell of insanity and to their relatives and survivors," he told the court on Monday.

According to a holocaust musuem website, around 65,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered or died at Stutthof. Most of the victims of the crime were shot in the back of the head or gassed with the lethal Zyklon B gas.