Holocaust survivor Abraham Korisky was brought to Stutthof Camp from Lithuania in 1944 when he was just a boy of sixteen, where the man facing trial, Bruno Dey, was an SS Nazi camp guard.
Although Dey is 93, he is being tried in Hamburg’s Juvenile Court as he was under-age when the atrocities were being carried out.
Holocaust survivor Korisky flew to Germany from his home in Israel accompanied by members of his family including his granddaughter, Dana Carmiel who said on social media that; ‘My grandfather is a brave hero, that testified for two hours against a Nazi war criminal.’
Stutthof Prison Camp was the first to be built by the Nazis outside of Germany and the last to be liberated.
It opened in early September 1939 to receive inmates and over the course of the War.
It is estimated that some 63,000 to 65,000 men, women and children died there. 28,000 were Jews, falling victim to abuse, murder, disease and extreme labour conditions.
The camp was staffed by German SS guards and later, Ukrainian auxiliaries. In 1942 295 female SS Aufseherinnen guards arrived to oversee women inmates across the complex and its sub-camps.
Thirty-four of these women were later identified by prosecutors as having committed crimes against humanity.
The first prisoners were drawn entirely from Poland, but eventually the population became more diverse so that by the end of the war people from twenty-eight countries and been brought to Stuthof, from France to Russia and all of the Nordic and Baltic States.
Surviving anecdotal evidence suggests that those arriving for immediate execution were seldom registered so the final number of those killed could be far higher than official figures suggest.
In his defence Bruno Dey stated that he was simply a guard charged with preventing escapes and keeping general order.
He admitted to being witness to prisoners being taken to the gas chambers but protested that he had little choice in regard to his own fate at the time.
Diagnosed with a heart condition Dey was excluded from fighting on the front line and so was assigned to Stuthof. He has since refused to be held accountable for what happened at the camp, ‘They would just have found someone else’, he said.
Korisky, for his part, confirmed to the court that he was not there in order to seek revenge for the events that took place at the camp some 74 years earlier, ‘I don’t care if he (Dey) goes to prison or not’.
His wish was simply that his testimony be recorded for history to reflect and learn. He would, he said, ‘never forgive and forget,’ but added that his revenge was the simple fact of the existence of his family.
He told of the regular, daily beatings that he and his fellow inmates endured and the sadistic horrors inflicted constantly, even while they were forced to work.
In one example, he recalled guards forcing a child to beat his own father to death in front of the other inmates.
Dey has been indicted as a concentration camp guard as assisting in the murder of Jewish prisoners from the 9th August 1944 to the 26th April 1945.
Holocaust Survivor
The trial started in 2018 and is one of the last indictments against alleged Nazi war criminals that will go to trial.
Of his time at the camp Dey said, ‘As an individual, you couldn’t assist the people at the concentration camps. I’m sorry for those people, but I couldn’t help.’
There were a number of former guards and officials charged and sent to trial directly after World War Two.
In the Spring of 1946 eleven defendants were sentenced to death, including the Camp Commandant Johann Pauls. Another nineteen were given jail terms.
In the Autumn of 1947, a second trial saw twenty-four ex-officials and camp guards found guilty with ten sentenced to death and the rest imprisoned. In November of the same year there were two more trials.
At the first, of twenty individuals charged nineteen were sent to prison while one was acquitted. At the second, twenty-seven were charged and one acquitted.
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94-year-old Johann Rehbogen was indicted for similar crimes and also tried in a Juvenile Court however proceedings were suspended in December 2018 following a medical report.