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Bruno Dey, a former SS watchman at the Stutthof concentration camp, hides his face behind a folder as he leaves the courtroom on a wheelchair after the verdict in his trial on July 23, 2020, in Hamburg, northern Germany. The 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard was handed a suspended sentence of two years in prison as a court in Hamburg found him guilty of complicity in WWII atrocities. In what could be one of the last such cases of surviving Nazi guards, Bruno Dey was convicted for his role in the killing of 5,230 people when he was a teenage SS tower guard at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk, in Poland. (Photo: FABIAN BIMMER, POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

A German court on Thursday convicted a 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard on thousands of counts of being an accessory to murder.

Bruno Dey was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for 5,232 counts of accessory to murder and one count of accessory to attempted murder dating back to his time at the Stutthof concentration camp from 1944 to 1945, according to the Hamburg state court.

The trial, which began last October, was held at a juvenile court because Dey was 17 and 18 years old when he was tasked with making sure prisoners at Stutthof did not escape or revolt. Prosecutors argued that Dey “knowingly supported the insidious and cruel killing of prisoners through the watch” and was a “small wheel in the machinery of murder.”

“How could you get used to the horror?” judge Anne Meier-Goering asked while announcing the verdict.

Dey apologized for his role in the crimes, saying “it must never be repeated,” in a closing statement this week.

“Today, I want to apologize to all of the people who went through this hellish insanity,” Dey told the court. “The images of misery and horror have haunted me my entire life.”

More than 60,000 people were killed at Stutthof, which was one of the first camps established outside of Germany during World War II and one of the last to be liberated. Many were given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot, starved, or put to death in gas chambers.

Dey acknowledged hearing screams from the camp’s gas chambers and watching as corpses were taken to be burned. But he said he never fired his weapon and once allowed a group to smuggle meat from a dead horse they’d discovered back into the camp.

Prosecutors had asked for a three-year sentence, and some advocates for Holocaust survivors have criticized the verdict as too lenient.

“It is unsatisfactory and much too late,” Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee told the New York Times. “What is so upsetting for survivors is that this defendant failed to use the many postwar years of his life to reflect on what he saw and heard.”

Dey’s trial, like others in the last two decades, is considered one of the last trials of former Nazis. A special prosecutors’ office is investigating more than a dozen Nazi-era crimes, and last week, a 95-year-old former guard at Stutthof was charged with similar crimes.

Dey’s conviction extended precedent set in the 2011 case of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk who was convicted as an accessory to murder on allegations that he was a guard at the Sobibor death camp.

German courts previously required evidence that a former guard participated in a specific killing, but prosecutors successfully argued in Demjanjuk’s trial that guarding a camp whose only purpose was murder was sufficient for an accessory conviction.

Contributing: The Associated Press

Follow N’dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg

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