Author(s): Tobias Buck

WWI & WWII

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, what is the significance - and the legacy - of the trial?

Yet Dey's trial raises questions that touch not just on German history, politics and memory culture, but also on Buck's own family history. During childhood visits to see his German grandparents, those dark years were never spoken of, but he remembers the old wedding photo on the mantelpiece in their bedroom, his grandfather in uniform with a swastika armband. He knows little else about his record during the war. Why did he never ask?

Through the prism of this gripping and complex courtroom drama Buck explores its wider significance, both political and personal. In Final Verdict he interrogates the questions: is it right to punish Bruno Dey more than seven decades after he stood guard at Stutthof concentration camp? And what would I have done in his place?