German Juvenile Court sentences 93-year old for 5.232 counts of murder

[Tender Branson]

BERLIN (AP) — A German court on Thursday convicted a 93-year-old former SS private of being an accessory to murder at the Stutthof concentration camp, where he served as a guard in the final months of World War II.

He was given a two-year suspended sentence.

Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder by the Hamburg state court, news agency dpa reported. That is equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945. He also was convicted as an accessory to attempted murder.

“How could you get used to the horror?” presiding judge Anne Meier-Goering asked as she announced the verdict. She said that the fact Dey was taking orders didn’t free him from guilt.

Because he was 17 and 18 at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey’s case was heard in juvenile court. Prosecutors had called for a three-year sentence, while the defense sought acquittal.

The judge said that, while Dey should have tried to avoid service at Stutthof, the sentence was appropriate to his guilt.

“You were not yet grown up then, still so young in a time when a lack of conscience had seized a whole people as never before,” Meier-Goering said.

...

In a closing statement earlier this week, the wheelchair-bound German retiree 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 told the court.

https://apnews.com/48760750c400b329e6540b6742804621

[NewYorkExpress]

I don't care that he's 93 years old, or that he was sixteen/seventeen at the time.

Nazis should get the Death Penalty. If Germany wasn't willing to execute him themselves, then they should have extradited him to Israel so they could do it.

[CumbrianLefty]

Israel has executed the precise total of one Nazi, no?

[Omega21]

I don't care that he's 93 years old, or that he was sixteen/seventeen at the time.

Nazis should get the Death Penalty. If Germany wasn't willing to execute him themselves, then they should have extradited him to Israel so they could do it.

Article 1 of the Grundgesetz

"Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt"

So I am pretty sure executions are not lawfully compatible with the 1st Article of the constitution.

[Hnv1]

Israel has executed the precise total of one Nazi, no?

Aye, and even that was terribly debated. Another one (Ivan the terrible) death sentence was repelled in the appeal along with his conviction. And that was the last of those show trials here.

I’m on the fence here, I prefer criminal laws to be under time limitations. Especially as he’s charged with a peripheral offence

[Astatine]

I don't care that he's 93 years old, or that he was sixteen/seventeen at the time.

Nazis should get the Death Penalty. If Germany wasn't willing to execute him themselves, then they should have extradited him to Israel so they could do it.

Article 1 of the Grundgesetz

"Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt"

So I am pretty sure executions are not lawfully compatible with the 1st Article of the constitution.

Article 102 of the Grundgesetz

"Die Todesstrafe ist abgeschafft."

The death sentence is abolished.

[Omega21]

I don't care that he's 93 years old, or that he was sixteen/seventeen at the time.

Nazis should get the Death Penalty. If Germany wasn't willing to execute him themselves, then they should have extradited him to Israel so they could do it.

Article 1 of the Grundgesetz

"Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt"

So I am pretty sure executions are not lawfully compatible with the 1st Article of the constitution.

Article 102 of the Grundgesetz

"Die Todesstrafe ist abgeschafft."

The death sentence is abolished.

Yeah, precisely, and it's the way it should be IMO. Even if 102 didn't exist I would think injecting someone with poison kinda goes against the whole "Human dignity is sacred" thing lol

This particular man is scum, no doubt about it, but Germany should not stoop to the level of him and his old Kameraden, even if the sentence would be "justified", unlike the sentences they carried out.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Israel has executed the precise total of one Nazi, no?

While Israel has technically the death penalty still on the books, it has carried out a grand total of two executions since its foundation:

IDF officer and suspected traitor Meir Tobianski in 1948 (posthumously exonerated) and Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

Former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk was sentenced to death by Israel in 1988, but he was later acquitted during the appeal. Roughly two decades later a German court sentenced Demjanjuk to five years in prison, but he passed away soon after the trial.

[brucejoel99]

He was 6 years old when the Nazis took over & changed the education system into a propagandistic one, 12 when war broke out, & 17 by the time it finished. So he was pretty much brainwashed.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, he was only a kid & was just doing what he was told to do, but on the other hand, he did some pretty awful things. But even if he was morally against it, what could he have done as a child?

Thinking back to when I was 6, if everybody told me that this group of people were the reason my country had been in an economic disaster for the entire duration of my life thus far, I might be inclined to believe them, especially without the easy access to information we have in this modern day & age. Not to say that he was in the right or shouldn't be punished, but this is a really difficult case to judge. All in all, though, I think the judges undertook this case very well.

[Middle-aged Europe]

He was 6 years old when the Nazis took over & changed the education system into a propagandistic one, 12 when war broke out, & 17 by the time it finished. So he was pretty much brainwashed.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, he was only a kid & was just doing what he was told to do, but on the other hand, he did some pretty awful things. But even if he was morally against it, what could he have done as a child?

Thinking back to when I was 6, if everybody told me that this group of people were the reason my country had been in an economic disaster for the entire duration of my life thus far, I might be inclined to believe them, especially without the easy access to information we have in this modern day & age. Not to say that he was in the right or shouldn't be punished, but this is a really difficult case to judge. All in all, though, I think the judges undertook this case very well.

One must assume that he still had parents and other family who didn't grew up under the Nazis and if they were good parents they must have tought him that murdering people is morally wrong.

[President Johnson]

I'm actually not sure how to feel about this. However, it would have sent a bad signal to convict the man.

I don't care that he's 93 years old, or that he was sixteen/seventeen at the time.

Nazis should get the Death Penalty. If Germany wasn't willing to execute him themselves, then they should have extradited him to Israel so they could do it.

Article 1 of the Grundgesetz

"Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt"

So I am pretty sure executions are not lawfully compatible with the 1st Article of the constitution.

The Grundgesetz further explicitly states that the death penalty is abolished (Article 102: Die Todesstrafe ist abgeschafft.)

[Silent Hunter]

The sentences (West) Germany gave were pretty low even back in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Auschwitz_trials

[CumbrianLefty]

And that's the ones that actually got brought to trial.

Plenty of serious offenders never were.

[brucejoel99]

He was 6 years old when the Nazis took over & changed the education system into a propagandistic one, 12 when war broke out, & 17 by the time it finished. So he was pretty much brainwashed.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, he was only a kid & was just doing what he was told to do, but on the other hand, he did some pretty awful things. But even if he was morally against it, what could he have done as a child?

Thinking back to when I was 6, if everybody told me that this group of people were the reason my country had been in an economic disaster for the entire duration of my life thus far, I might be inclined to believe them, especially without the easy access to information we have in this modern day & age. Not to say that he was in the right or shouldn't be punished, but this is a really difficult case to judge. All in all, though, I think the judges undertook this case very well.

One must assume that he still had parents and other family who didn't grew up under the Nazis and if they were good parents they must have tought him that murdering people is morally wrong.

I mean, all of Germany didn't grow up under the Nazis, but they elected them nevertheless.

And if they weren't good parents who taught their child that murdering people is morally wrong, then that's just blaming the child for the fault of the parents. If the parents actively took part in the brainwashing of the child, then I don't really think you can say that the child is somehow at fault for the effects of the brainwashing.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

How do you have 232 thousandths of a count of murder?

[palandio]

To put it provocatively, we let too many of the really bad guys, commanders and perpetrators get away with too much in the 60s and now we're trying to make up for it by sending random low-level old guys to the court as surrogates. At first people got away with committing atrocities, then they got convicted for committing atrocities and now they are indicted even if no atrocity can be directly attributed to them. The main reason this guy was sent to court is that unlike his comrades he lived until 2020 to serve our self-righteousness.

Even in the case of Demjanjuk you could argue that whereas the first Israeli trial happened because he was suspected to be "Ivan the Terrible", during the later trials and attempted trials he was basically used as a surrogate.

[Silent Hunter]

How do you have 232 thousandths of a count of murder?

It's 5,232 counts. Tender used the mainland European convention of periods for the thousand and commas for decimals.

[jaymichaud]

Israel has executed the precise total of one Nazi, no?

Yeah. Shame Mengele wasn’t caught.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Ugly business.

Not many winners in this story.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

How do you have 232 thousandths of a count of murder?

It's 5,232 counts. Tender used the mainland European convention of periods for the thousand and commas for decimals.

I know, but as usual I'm making fun of that.  Especially since the article he quoted used the opposite convention and this is  US website, not a European one.

[CumbrianLefty]

Ugly business.

Not many winners in this story.

That sounds a bit "both sides"-y to me.