ALL appeals against the conviction of a former Nazi concentration-camp guard have now been dropped, a Hamburg court says, easing the way for possible future prosecutions.

Bruno Dey, now 93, was convicted last month of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court — equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at the Stutthof camp while he worked there in 1944 and 1945. His case was heard in a juvenile court as he had been 17 and 18 at the time and he was given a two-year suspended sentence.

Dey was convicted under new legal reasoning that even though there was no evidence linking him to a specific crime, as a camp guard he was guilty of accessory to murders committed while he was there. 

The reasoning had been successfully used in the past to convict death-camp guards and the precedent set in 2015 when a federal court upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening. However, those cases applied to guards at camps specifically set up to exterminate people. Dey’s is the first conviction relating to a general-purpose concentration camp that also took part in the Holocaust extermination programme. There are more than a dozen similar cases being investigated.

Stutthof was the first Nazi concentration camp set up outside Germany, in occupied Poland. Some 63-65,000 people were killed there, 28,000 Jews and the remainder mainly Polish and Soviet prisoners of war, before it was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. Camp staff were a mix of SS guards and, from 1943, far-right Ukrainian auxiliaries recruited in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.