Former SS guard goes on trial over 5.230 murders in what could be last ever Nazi prosecution of its kind

In what could possibly be the last court case of its kind, a former Nazi concentration camp guard is on trial in Hamburg.

Bruno Dey, who joined the SS in his teens, covered his face on his recent arrival at court in a wheelchair, on the third day of a 23-day trial, scheduled to run until late February. As a result of the ages of those involved, each trial day is limited to two hours a day and there are a maximum of two trial days per week.

Facing 5,230 counts of accessory to murder, Dey claimed in a statement he had no knowledge of the mass murders underway at the Stutthof concentration camp, despite admitting seeing prisoners led into the gas chambers, hearing their screams and noting the rattling of the steel door.

The case is one of the last of its kind, not least because those old enough to have been actively involved are now nonagenarians.

East of Danzig in Poland, Stutthof was built by Germany in 1939 and was first used as the main collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from the city.

When Dey was posted there from mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos being cleared by the Nazis in the Baltics as well as from Auschwitz, and thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal suppression of the Warsaw uprising, were crammed into the camp.

> World