Because he was only 17, and later 18, at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey’s case is being heard in juvenile court.

By Associated Press

As a 17-year-old SS private, Bruno Dey could hear the screams of Jews dying in the gas chamber of Nazi Germany’s Stutthof concentration camp from his post in a guard tower, and he watched daily as their bodies were carted to the crematorium to be turned into ash.

A Hamburg state court is set to decide Thursday whether Dey’s role as a camp guard more than 75 years ago is enough to convict him of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed in Stutthof during his service there.

In a closing statement to the court earlier this week, the wheelchair-bound German retiree, now 93, apologized for his role in the Nazis’ machinery of destruction, saying “it must never be repeated.”

“Today, I want to apologize to all of the people who went through this hellish insanity,” Dey said.

Because he was only 17, and later 18, at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey’s case is being heard in juvenile court. He faces a possible sentence of six months to 10 years in prison, if convicted.

The trial opened in October, and in deference to Dey’s age, court sessions were limited to two, two-hour sessions a week. Additional precautions also were taken to keep the case going through the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Prosecutors are seeking a three-year prison sentence, partially in a nod to Dey’s stated contrition and his cooperation with authorities. Defense attorney Stefan Waterkamp has argued for an acquittal, saying that Dey found himself working at Stutthof only by happenstance and that he would have been in danger himself if he had tried to get out of guard duty.

“How could an 18-year-old step out of line in a situation like this?” Waterkamp asked while giving his closing argument.

Representatives of some 40 Stutthof survivors and their relatives who joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, which is allowed under German law, have urged the court to convict Dey but not pushed for a punishment beyond the prosecution’s recommendation.

For at least two decades, every trial of a former Nazi has been dubbed “likely Germany’s last.” But just last week, another ex-guard at Stutthof guard was charged at age 95, and the special prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi-era crimes has more than a dozen ongoing investigations.

That’s due in part to a precedent established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to the murders of nearly 28,000 Jews based on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland. He died at age 91 while the case was on appeal.

Before Demjanjuk’s case, German courts had required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guard’s participation in a specific killing, a legal standard that was often next to impossible to meet given the circumstances of the crimes committed at Nazi death camps.

However, prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk’s trial in Munich that guarding a camp where the only purpose was murder was enough for an accessory conviction.

Demjanjuk steadfastly denied the allegations against him and died before his appeal could be heard. A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening, solidifying the precedent.

The Dey case extends the argument to apply to a concentration camp guard, rather than a death camp guard. Prosecutors say it should still apply in his case since tens of thousands died at Stutthof even though the camp did not exist for the sole purpose of extermination, unlike the death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Sobibor.

Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Jerusalem, noted that none of the people convicted of Nazi crimes in recent years spent time behind bars due to their advanced ages, but he said that was no reason to stop the pursuit.

“The larger question is whether conventional justice can do justice to a tragedy in the scope of the Holocaust,” Zuroff said in a telephone interview. “The answer is not black and white. The justice that’s achieved in certain respects is only symbolic justice, but symbolic justice has its purpose and has its value.”

‘A small wheel in the machinery of murder’

Prosecutors have argued that as Stutthof guard from August 1944 to April 1945, Dey aided in all the killings that took place there during that period as a “small wheel in the machinery of murder.”

“The accused was no ardent worshiper of Nazi ideology,” Dey’s indictment stated. “But there is also no doubt that he never actively challenged the persecutions of the Nazi regime.”

Dey gave wide-ranging statements to investigators about his service, saying that he was deemed unfit for combat in the regular Germany army in 1944 so was drafted into an SS guard detachment and sent to the camp not far from his hometown near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called “work education camp” where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

From mid-1944, when Dey was posted there, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure, or were put to death in a gas chamber.

Dey told the court that as a trained baker’s apprentice, he attempted to get sent to an army kitchen or bakery when he learned he’d been assigned to Stutthof.

As a guard there, he said he frequently was directed to watch over prisoner labor crews working outside the camp.

Dey acknowledged hearing screams from the camp’s gas chambers and watching as corpses were taken to be burned, but he said he never fired his weapon and once allowed a group to smuggle meat from a dead horse they’d discovered back into the camp.

“The images of misery and horror have haunted me my entire life,” he testified.

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A new Netflix series documents the trial of John Demjanjuk, accused of being the concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible, ILTV reports.

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As chief justice, he is well remembered as the one who overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi guard at the Sobibor death camp, who was facing capital punishment for crimes against humanity.

By World Israel News Staff

Former Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Meir Shamgar will be laid to rest on Tuesday in a public funeral. Before the funeral, he lay in state for several hours at the Supreme Court to allow the public to pay its respects.

Shamgar’s sons Dan and Ram along with Prime Minister Benjamin, President Rivlin, Supreme Court President Esther Hayut, former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, and former Justice Edna Arbel will deliver eulogies at the funeral.

Shamgar passed away Saturday at the age of 94.

Israeli and Jewish leaders worldwide have mourned the passing of the former chief justice.

“Meir Shamgar had an important role in shaping the foundation of Israeli jurisprudence including legal policy in Judea and Samaria,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. “I will always recall with esteem our joint activity in managing the Yonatan Institute after the passing of my brother Yoni. May Meir’s memory be blessed.”

Rivlin said that Shamgar was “a man of truth, learned and wise, groundbreaking, brave, honest and modest.”

“We mourn the loss of one of Israel’s greatest jurists who served as President of the Supreme Court for 12 of his 20 years as a justice,” said the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations

“He earned universal respect and admiration. He addressed the Conference of Presidents both in Israel and on his visits to the United States. We extend our condolences to his family,” he added.

Shamgar was born in 1925 in Danzig, Poland. In 1939, he immigrated to Israel which was then controlled by the British Mandate. During that time, he was exiled by the British to Africa for his participation with a group of Jewish resistance fighters.

When the State was established in 1948, Shamgar returned to Israel and enlisted in the IDF. In 1968 he was appointed Attorney General of the State of Israel, a position he held until 1975 when he was appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court. Shamgar became chief justice in 1983, a position he held onto until 1995.

As attorney general, he made the decision to allow Palestinians in Judea and Samaria to submit legal appeals directly to Israel’s Supreme Court.

As chief justice, he is well remembered as the one who overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi guard at the Sobibor death camp, who was facing capital punishment for crimes against humanity.

After his retirement in 1995, Shamgar led the committee that investigated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish extremist.

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The appeal of Elor Azaria, who killed a seemingly neutralized Palestinian terrorist, claiming he feared the assailant was carrying a bomb, has begun.

The appeal of Pvt. Elor Azaria, who on January 4 was convicted of manslaughter for killing an apparently neutralized terrorist in Hebron on March 24 last year, got underway Sunday morning at the Defense Ministry compound, known as the Kirya in Tel Aviv. Azaria, 20, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and 12 months probation, as well as being demoted in rank. Shortly after the sentencing, IDF lawyers demanded a harsher sentence.

At the court-martial appeal, military judge Zvi Segal questioned why Azaria was appealing his conviction and relatively light jail sentence.

“None of the soldiers, officers or armed civilians at the scene, despite having felt danger, drew their weapon and shot the terrorist,” Segal told Azaria’s defense lawyer, Yoram Sheftel.

Judge Brig.-Gen. (res.) Avi Peled similarly asked Sheftel, “What I’m not hearing from you is why the appellant, unlike everyone else at the scene (at Tel Rumeida in Hebron), felt danger and opened fire?”

Sheftel argued that “in the (Ziad) Jilani case, only one police officer opened fire as well,” referring to a 2010 shooting incident in which a Border Policeman killed a Palestinian who rammed his car into a police position in eastern Jerusalem. The officer shot Jilani at close range while the latter was lying on the ground. Some six months later, the Police Investigation Unit closed the file, citing lack of sufficient evidence.

This wasn’t the first time Sheftel brought up the Jilani case. Previously, Segal reprimanded him, saying him that “in the Jilani case, the soldier acted according to the rules of engagement.”

Segal also inquired whether “there is an explanation as to why Azaria handed his helmet over to his friend before shooting? After all, he was afraid (the terrorist carried) a bomb.”

“I don’t remember. He wasn’t asked about that,” Sheftel responded, adding, “Is anyone examining such nuances? Why is Azaria being picked on with nuances?”

To this, Segal responded, “You claim in your appeal that Azaria made a professional error and nothing more. I can’t find a single sentence in his testimony (to indicate that)… Azaria even explained in his testimony that everyone else was negligent, and he was right.”

Defense Attorney Claims Testimony ‘Fabricated’

Sheftel claimed that the testimony of Azaria’s company commander, Maj. Tom Na’aman, was fabricated to his client’s detriment.

He insisted Na’aman’s evidence “was fabricated in the most disgraceful manner possible. He did a 180 with his version. It’s a serious oversight that the previous defense attorneys didn’t question the company commander on that. The fact there was no cross-examination on the matter is not enough to remove all doubts from his intolerable testimony.”

Sheftel has made a career defending unpopular cases. He represented convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk.

Sheftel was not part of Azaria’s original defense team. He joined mid-trial, and remained the sole lawyer after Eyal Besserglick, Ilan Katz and Karmit Scheiber resigned over disagreements on whether to appeal the verdict.

Since the fatal shooting in Hebron nearly a year and a half ago, Azaria has become a hero to many who, rather than viewing his shooting as a failure to follow IDF orders about the use of weapons, champion his actions as a resolute and appropriate response to terrorism. In Azaria’s words, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif – the knife-wielding Palestinian who wounded an IDF soldier – “deserved to die.”

By: Gil Zohar, World Israel News

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Over 70 years have passed since unspeakable crimes were committed during the Holocaust. Unfortunately, it has taken this long for German authorities to finally bring some of the last living Nazi war criminals to justice.

By: AP

A 94-year-old former SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp is going on trial this week on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, the first of up to four cases being brought to court this year in an 11th-hour push by German prosecutors to punish Nazi war crimes.

Reinhold Hanning is accused of serving as an SS Unterscharfuehrer — similar to a sergeant — in Auschwitz from January 1943 to June 1944, a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were brought to the camp in cattle cars and were gassed to death.

Setting Judicial Precedents

The trial for the retiree from a town near the western city of Detmold starts on Thursday and is one of the latest that follow a precedent set in 2011, when former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.

The verdict vastly widened the number of possible prosecutions, establishing that simply helping the camp to function was sufficient to make one an accessory to the murders committed there. Before that, prosecutors needed to present evidence of a specific crime — a difficult task with few surviving witnesses and perpetrators whose names were rarely known and whose faces were often only seen briefly.

Hanning’s attorney, Johannes Salmen, says that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were murdered.

Prosecutor Andreas Brendel told The Associated Press, however, that guards in the main camp were also used as on-call guards to augment those in Birkenau when trainloads of Jews were brought in.

“We believe that these auxiliaries were used in particular during the so-called Hungarian action in support of Birkenau,” he said.

‘He Has to Speak the Truth’

Leon Schwarzbaum, a 94-year-old Auschwitz survivor from Berlin who is the first witness scheduled for the trial, said he can’t forget the vivid images he witnessed there.

Holocaust survivor Leon Schwarzbaum displays a photo of his murdered relatives. (Bernd Thissen/dpa via AP)

“The chimneys were spewing fire … and the smell of burning human flesh was so unbelievable that one could hardly bear it,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Though he said he felt deeply unsettled about staring Hanning in the eyes in the courtroom Thursday, he said he thought it was important to be there and that more than punishment, he hoped the trial would give the former SS man an opportunity to give a full accounting of what he saw and did.

“It’s perhaps the last time for him to tell the truth. He has to speak the truth,” Schwarzbaum said.

In all, about 40 Auschwitz survivors or their relatives have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law, though not all will testify.

Hanning’s case is one of some 30 involving former Auschwitz guards investigated by federal prosecutors from Germany’s special Nazi war crimes office in Ludwigsburg. It was sent to state prosecutors in 2013 with the recommendation that they pursue charges after the office undertook a major review of its files following the Demjanjuk verdict.

Although Demjanjuk always denied serving at the death camp and died before his appeal could be heard, prosecutors last year managed to use the same legal reasoning to successfully convict SS Unterscharfuehrer Oskar Groening, who served in Auschwitz, on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Groening’s appeal is expected to be heard sometime this year, but prosecutors are not waiting to move ahead with other cases.

Hubert Zafke, 95, a former SS Oberscharfuehrer — roughly equivalent to a Sgt. 1st Class — is scheduled to go on trial at the end of February in Neubrandenburg, north of Berlin, on 3,681 counts of accessory to murder on accusations he served as a medic at an SS hospital in Auschwitz in 1944.

His attorney, Peter-Michael Diestel, says it is Germany’s “shame” that many higher-ranking Auschwitz perpetrators and other Nazi war criminals were able to escape with minimal or no sentences in the initial years after the war, and questions whether prosecutors are trying “to make up for mistakes of the past” with his client.

“He was a medic for Wehrmacht (army) soldiers and SS men — for uniformed men — and had no part of the Holocaust, but the judicial argument of the Demjanjuk verdict says that if he didn’t provide his service as a medic then Auschwitz wouldn’t have functioned,” Diestel said. “What should a young man, even if he knew what was going on in Auschwitz, do to stop it?”

Germany Rectifying Past Failures

There is no question there were “some serious failures by the German judicial system in the past,” says Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But “that doesn’t in any way change the validity of what’s happening now.”

“In a certain sense, you could say these people had the bad luck to live a long life,” he told the AP in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “If they had died five years ago they would never have been going to trial.”

Two others whose cases are likely to go to trial this year are a 93-year-old woman charged with 260,000 counts of accessory to murder on allegations she served as a radio operator for Auschwitz’s commandant in 1944, and a 94-year-old man charged with 1,276 counts on allegations he served as an Auschwitz guard.

In all four cases, the health of the elderly defendants will be a major factor in whether the trials can be concluded.

Hanning’s will be limited to two hours per day in deference to his age, and his attorney says his client’s health will be checked again by an expert as the trial opens.

Still, Jens Rommel, the head of the Nazi war crimes investigative office in Ludwigsburg, says it is too early to talk of the last round of trials. There are a half-dozen open investigations right now with state prosecutors, and his office is looking into another seven suspects from both the Auschwitz and the Majdanek death camps.

“Year by year it’s more difficult, but the state justice ministers last year decided that Ludwigsburg would keep working,” he says. “The state of North-Rhine Westphalia last summer talked about another 10 years as a timeframe.”

Auschwitz survivor Justin Sonder, who is scheduled to testify Friday, said it’s never too late to pursue those responsible for running the camps.

“I’m often asked if there were SS men in Auschwitz who showed compassion,” the 90 year-old from Chemnitz said. “No, absolutely not!”

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