Final Verdict

It is 17 October 2019, the opening day of a trial in Hamburg''s imposing criminal justice building that is historic in more ways than one. Bruno Dey is accused of being an accessory to a crime that took place more than seven decades ago: the murder of at least 5,230 inmates at Stutthof, a Nazi concentration camp in present-day Poland. He was seventeen at the time, and a member of the SS unit charged with administering and guarding the camps. Dey admits he served as a guard at Stutthof from August 1944 to April 1945, but he denies the accusation that he had any role in the murders, even as an accessory.

The trial of Bruno Dey comes at a poignant moment for modern Germany. After fifteen years of stable government, the Merkel era is coming to an end and support for the AFD is ever-growing. The last members of the war generation - victims and perpetrators alike - are disappearing, and with them all first-hand knowledge of how the Holocaust came to pass. Against that backdrop, wha