A court in Hamburg has convicted a 93-year-old German man of helping to murder 5,232 prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp in World War II and handed him a suspended two-year sentence.
In one of the last cases against Nazi-era crimes, Bruno Dey was an SS guard in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, in what is now Poland.
He was found guilty of being involved in killings between August 1944 and April 1945.
His defence insisted that he did not join the SS voluntarily before serving at the camp, ending up assigned there because a heart condition excluded him from frontline service.
But prosecutors argued that his involvement was crucial to the killings, as his time in the SS coincided with the "Final Solution" order to systematically exterminate Jews through gassing, starvation or denial of medical care.
Due to him being only 17 or 18 years old at the time of the crimes, Dey was subject to youth sentencing guidelines.
During his testimony in May, he told the court that he wanted to forget his time at the camp.
"I don't want to keep going over the past," he told the Hamburg tribunal.
Judge Anna Meier-Goering had asked whether Dey had spoken to his children and grandchildren about the time he stood guard at Stutthof.
"I don't bear any guilt for what happened back then," he said. "I didn't contribute anything to it, other than standing guard. But I was forced to do it, it was an order."
