

Former SS camp guard tells court he's 'haunted' by killings

A 93-year-old German former concentration camp guard on trial in Hamburg on thousands of counts of accessory to murder testified that he regrets having served there.
He apologised yesterday to the victims of the Stutthof camp, saying that he had been posted there unwillingly after being deemed unfit for combat duty due to a heart ailment.
Former Nazi guard Bruno Dey is on trial in Hamburg for being an accessory to mass murder. (AP)
Despite his advanced age, Dey's being tried in juvenile court because he was 17 when he started serving at Stutthof.
He has been open with investigators about serving at Stutthof, acknowledging that he heard screams from the camp's gas chambers and watched as corpses were taken to the crematoria to be burned.
A file photo of the Stutthof concentration camp built in Nazi-occupied Poland where Bruno Dey served as a guard. (AP)
With training as a baker's apprentice, he told the court when he learned he'd been assigned to Stutthof he attempted to be assigned to an army kitchen or bakery instead, to no avail.
As a guard there, he said he had frequently been assigned to watch over prisoner labour crews working outside the camp. But, he said, he had never fired his weapon and had once allowed a group to smuggle back to camp meat from a dead horse they'd discovered.
When he compared his standing naked before a military doctor for an exam to the prisoners standing naked for inspection in Stutthof, Meier-Goering stopped him, asking whether he didn't find his comparison a "slap in the face" to the survivors.
The gas chamber at the Stutthof camp where Bruno Dey was a Nazi guard. (Getty)
"It was certainly different, in any case," he said, revising his comment. "One can't make that comparison."
In deference to Dey's age, the court sessions are being limited to two hours a day, and two sessions a week. His testimony is scheduled to continue Friday.

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