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Episodes release weekly on the history extra feed or subscribe to history extra plus on Apple to access all episodes ad free now. Welcome to the History Extra Podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine.

In October 2019, Bruno Die went on trial in Hamburg for his involvement in a horrific crime, 75 years after that crime had been committed.

Die was now an old man, but in his youth he'd served as a guard

at Stuthov concentration camp, where thousands of people were murdered by the Nazis.

Die's trial was one of the last times that the Holocaust would be the subject of legal proceedings

and raise many questions around justice, moral culpability, and ultimately how a society could descend into genocide.

The Financial Times journalist Tobias Book witnessed the trial and tells its story in his new book the final verdict.

He spoke to Rob Atta.

Tobias, could you please begin by introducing us to Bruno Die?

Who was he and what at his role being in the Second World War?

Yes, so Bruno Die was the accused in this Holocaust trial in Hamburg that lasted from 2019 to 2020. He was a very old man. He was 93 years old by the time the trial started and by the time justice caught up with him. But he was only 17 years old when he arrived at Stuthofe concentration camp to start his duty as an SS campguard there.

He turned 18 while he was there.

So he was only there for a fairly brief period of time. He arrived in August

1944, so already well towards the end of the war and stayed there until April

45. And after that he really lived a very quiet, unblemished life in and around Hamburg until finally, 75 years after the war, he got a knock on the door from the German police who told him

that he was under investigation as an accessory to murder in more than 5,000

cases. Okay and I think that for a lot of our listeners the name of Stutov won't be as familiar perhaps as some of the other concentration camps and death camps like Auschwitz, Dachau, Subabour.

Could you tell us a little bit about Stutof and how that cab operated?

Yeah, so Stutof was a comparatively small concentration camp, was located on the outskirts of now

now Polish city of Gedansk. It was set up initially by the Nazis primarily to house Polish political

prisoners. But then as the war dragged on and especially as some of the concentration camps further east fell under the

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