A 93-year-old man, identified as Bruno D, was discovered as a former Nazi concentration camp guard in April 2019. Thursday, he was convicted of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder from 1944 to 1945, when he served as an SS guard.
Bruno worked at Stutthof concentration camp, where thousands were shot, poisoned, and denied access to food and water, court documents state. Ben Cohen, a grandson to Judy Meisel who was imprisoned in the camp, spoke with CNN regarding the symbolic justice of the conviction.
''On behalf of my grandmother and our family, this verdict sends a powerful message that a guard in any camp cannot deny responsibility for what happened," Cohen said. "Unfortunately, most perpetrators of the Holocaust were never prosecuted and so we are left with something that feels like symbolic justice today, rather than true justice.
"The most important thing to us is that these horrific things should never happen again and that the world can be educated about the capacity for seemingly normal people to be part of the most horrific evil."
The Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes says 14 other cases are under investigation related to the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Stutthof.
[Via]