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Ex-Nazi guard accused of 5,230 murders appears in German court

A 93-year-old former concentration camp guard has arrived in court in a wheelchair, in what could be one of Germany's last trials of Nazi war crimes.

Bruno D., whose surname cannot be given for legal reasons, is accused of being an accessory to 5,230 murders in the final months of World War Two.

He was part of a force manning the watchtowers in Stutthof concentration camp, near what is now the city of Gdansk in Poland, prosecutors say.

He was 17 and 18 at the time of the alleged offences, so the nonagenarian will be tried in a youth court.

Wearing a broad-brimmed hat, the defendant tried to shield his face behind a red folder as an official wheeled him into the Hamburg courtroom for the start of his trial.

Tens of thousands of people, mostly Jews, died at the camp during the six years of its existence. Many were murdered in its gas chamber while others succumbed to hunger, sickness and exhaustion.

A descendant of a survivor told reporters he came from New York to represent his family.

Ben Cohen said his great-grandmother was murdered at Stutthof gas chamber and that his 90-year-old grandmother "constantly asks 'why, why would they do this? How could they do this?"

Prosecutors argue that as a guard he was an accessory to murder through the act of stopping inmates escaping from the camp, which was one of the last to be liberated in 1945.

Broadcaster NDR reported there are around 29 open cases in Germany against people accused of being involved in the Holocaust, in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime murdered more than 6 million Jews.

(Source: Reuters)


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