Stutthof concentration camp
Stutthof concentration campiStock

A Hamburg court says a 92-year-old former SS private will go on trial after being charged with 5,230 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard at the Stutthof concentration camp, Associated Press reported.

A spokesman told AP on Thursday that the suspect, named as Bruno Dey in German media, was found healthy enough to stand trial and will do so on October 17, provided that daily sessions are no longer than two hours.

In April, Dey was charged by Hamburg prosecutors with aiding in the "malicious and cruel" killing of prisoners at the Stutthof concentration camp. He served as a concentration camp guard there for nine months, from August 1944 until April 1945. Stutthof was located in what is now Poland.

He told prosecutors that he was aware that people were being murdered in the camp's gas chambers and had seen the murders taking place, according to the German Die Welt newspaper. “What good would it have done for me to leave? They’d just have found somebody else,” Dey said. “I felt bad for the people there. I didn’t know why they were there. I knew that they were Jews who had committed no crime.”

Dey, who was 17 when he served as a guard, stressed to the prosecutors that he hadn't been a Nazi sympathizer and had joined the SS due to a heart weakness which precluded him from serving in a standard military unit.