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‘This must never happen again’: Ex-Nazi guard apologises to Holocaust victims

A 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard apologised to Holocaust victims at a Hamburg court on Monday, ahead of the verdict in the high-profile trial over his complicity in the World War II atrocities.

'This must never happen again': Ex-Nazi guard apologises to Holocaust victims
Dey on trial on Friday in Hamburg. Photo: DPA

“Today I would like to apologise to those who went through the hell of this madness, as well as to their relatives. Something like this must never happen again,” said Bruno Dey from the dock.

In what could be one of the last such cases of surviving Nazi guards, Dey stands accused of complicity in the murder of 5,230 people when he worked as an SS tower guard at the Stutthof camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland.

READ ALSO: Former Nazi camp guard, 93, faces German court reckoning

The court is expected to issue its verdict on Thursday.

Prosecutors have sought three years in jail for the 93-year-old.

But in his summary on Monday, Dey's defence lawyer Stefan Waterkamp asked the court for an acquittal or a suspended sentence, saying his client “would not survive” jail.

Dey himself has denied any guilt for what happened at the camp, and said that the trial had “cost a lot of strength”.

“I would like to stress again that I would never have voluntarily signed up to the SS or any other unit — especially not in a concentration camp,” he said in his final statements before the court delivers its verdict.

“If I had seen an opportunity to remove myself from service, I would have done so.”

He added that he only became aware of the “extent of the atrocities” upon hearing witness testimonies and reports.

Yet one Stutthof survivor dismissed Dey's comments on Monday.

“I'm speechless. I don't want his apology, I don't need it,” Marek
Dunin-Wasowicz, a 93-year-old camp survivor told AFP via telephone from his home in Warsaw.

Visitors to the Stutthof concentration camp memorial site. Photo: DPA

'Inhumane conditions'

Dey is standing trial at a juvenile court because he was aged between 17 and 18 at the time.

Waterkamp, his lawyer, pointed out that such a young man could hardly have been expected to break ranks, and that the teenaged Dey “saw no escape”.

He added that as a mere tower guard, Dey would not have known the extent of the “sadism” and “inhumane conditions” of the camp.

Waterkamp also said that the Nazi crimes were “incomprehensible” and that the witness testimonies had “severely shaken” his client.

The Nazis set up the Stutthof camp in 1939, initially using it to detain Polish political prisoners.

But it ended up holding 110,000 detainees, including many Jews. Some 65,000 people perished in the camp.

READ ALSO: How Germany remembers the Holocaust

Dey, who now lives in Hamburg, became a baker after the war.

Married with two daughters, he supplemented his income by working as a truck driver, before later taking on a job in building maintenance.

He came into prosecutors' sights after a landmark 2011 ruling against former Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk on the basis that he was part of the Nazi killing machine.

Since then, Germany has been racing to put on trial surviving SS personnel on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual accused.

Another former guard at the Stutthof camp, now 95, was charged last week with complicity in the murder of several hundred people.

The district court in Wuppertal will have to determine with the help of experts if the accused in that case is fit for trial.

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French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts

A French court has ordered Twitter to give activists full access to all its documents relating to efforts to combat racism, sexism and other forms of hate speech on the social network.

French court orders Twitter to reveal anti-hate speech efforts
Photo: Alastair Pike | AFP

Six anti-discrimination groups had taken Twitter to court in France last year, accusing the US social media giant of “long-term and persistent” failures in blocking hateful comments from the site.

The Paris court ordered Twitter to grant the campaign groups full access to all documents relating to the company’s efforts to combat hate speech since May 2020. The ruling applies to Twitter’s global operation, not just France.

Twitter must hand over “all administrative, contractual, technical or commercial documents” detailing the resources it has assigned to fighting homophobic, racist and sexist discourse on the site, as well as “condoning crimes against humanity”.

The San Francisco-based company was given two months to comply with the ruling, which also said it must reveal how many moderators it employs in France to examine posts flagged as hateful, and data on the posts they process.

The ruling was welcomed by the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF), one of the groups that had taken the social media giant to court.

“Twitter will finally have to take responsibility, stop equivocating and put ethics before profit and international expansion,” the UEJF said in a statement on its website.

Twitter’s hateful conduct policy bans users from promoting violence, or threatening or attacking people based on their race, religion, gender identity or disability, among other forms of discrimination.

Like other social media businesses it allows users to report posts they believe are hateful, and employs moderators to vet the content.

But anti-discrimination groups have long complained that holes in the policy allow hateful comments to stay online in many cases.

French prosecutors on Tuesday said they have opened an investigation into a wave of racist comments posted on Twitter aimed at members of the country’s national football team.

The comments, notably targeting Paris Saint-Germain star Kylian Mbappe, were posted after France was eliminated from the Euro 2020 tournament last week.

France has also been having a wider public debate over how to balance the right to free speech with preventing hate speech, in the wake of the controversial case of a teenager known as Mila.

The 18-year-old sparked a furore last year when her videos, criticising Islam in vulgar terms, went viral on social media.

Thirteen people are on trial accused of subjecting her to such vicious harassment that she was forced to leave school and was placed under police protection.

While President Emmanuel Macron is among those who have defended her right to blaspheme, left-wing critics say her original remarks amounted to hate speech against Muslims.

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