Ex-SS guard charged with 5,230 counts of accessory to murder

BERLIN – A former Nazi guard has been charged with 5,230 counts of accessory to murder at the Stutthof concentration camp during the final months of World War II, German prosecutors said Thursday.

Prosecutors in the northern city of Hamburg said Thursday that the 92-year-old suspect, whose name they didn't release, is accused of assisting in the "malicious and cruel" killing of mainly Jewish inmates through his work as an SS guard at the camp between August 1944 and April 1945.

Prosecutors said the man, who was aged 17-18 at the time and would therefore be tried as a juvenile, was "a little wheel in the machinery of murder" which saw thousands of people shot dead, poisoned or starved toward the end of the war.

German daily Die Welt reported that the suspect, who it identified as Bruno Dey, acknowledged to investigators he was aware of the camp's gas chambers and saw bodies taken to the crematoriums, but denied being a supporter of Nazi ideology and expressed regret for the fate of Jews.

German prosecutors have charged a number of aging former concentration camp guards in recent years. There have been some convictions but in several cases the defendants' poor health has prevented them going on trial.