Hamburg, Germany — Bruno Dey was 17 years old when he joined the unit Death's Head unit of Adolf Hitler's SS, the division tasked with running Nazi death camps. On Thursday, now 93, Dey faced the first day of his trial on charges of being an accessory to more than 5,000 murders. It could be the last trial of its kind in Germany, as Dey is one of the few Nazi suspects still alive who could be charged over their actions during the Holocaust....
...Judy Meisel (click here) is one of the 20 co-plaintiffs in the case against Dey. She witnessed the atrocities carried out by the Germans in Stutthof. Together with her mother and her sister Rachel, she was sent to the concentration camp from her native Lithuania in 1941 after Hitler's forces invaded.
"Her mother was murdered in the gas chamber," Meisel's grandson Benjamin Cohen told CBS News on Thursday after watching the trial begin. "They were tortured, her hair was ripped out by two SS men when they arrived at the camp. It was total brutality."
Meisel is now an American citizen and lives in Minnesota. She couldn't travel to Germany for the trial for health reasons.
She and her sister both managed to escape from Stutthof. Her grandson has vowed to tell her story, and he hopes to hear Bruno Dey's side of the story, too, to get an answer to the question his grandmother has longed for.
"How could they do this? How could someone be a part of that?" he said. "Her lesson is the power of the human spirit, to come out of it not hateful and not looking for revenge."...
