A former guard at Stutthof concentration camp will go on trial in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday, in what could be one of the last criminal cases of an individual charged over the Holocaust.

The 93-year-old man, Bruno Dey, was 17 when he joined the SS-Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion), which manned the watchtowers at the concentration camp east of what is now the city of Gdańsk, in Poland.

Between August 1944 and April 1945, Dey is accused of having been an accessory to the murder of 5,230 people. The figure includes 5,000 prisoners who fell victim to a typhus epidemic due to being denied access to food, water and medication as well as catastrophic hygiene conditions, 200 people who were gassed with Zyklon B and 30 peopleleadership and intelligentsia, but was from 1944 increasingly used to hold and kill Jews transferred from the Baltic states, Hungary and the Auschwitz concentration camp. By the end of 1944, 70% of Stutthof’s population was Jewish.

The Hamburg trial has about 20 co-plaintiffs who spent time at Stutthof, of which four are former members of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), the dominant resistance movement in Poland, and two are women who fought in the Warsaw uprising. Witnesses will fly in from America, Israel and Poland to give testimony in front of the court from the end of October.

Even though none of the witnesses are likely to remember Dey, the trial has a high symbolic value for many of the victims. “This is not a matter of revenge,” said Markus