The trial of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former SS guard at the Stutthof concentration camp, took a bizarre turn this week as a co-plaintiff withdrew from the case after inconsistencies were found in the story of his background.

An investigation conducted by the German newsweekly Der Spiegel found that Moshe Peter Loth, 76, had not been imprisoned in Stutthof as an infant, as he had previously claimed, and neither was he the grandson of a Jewish woman who died in the gas chambers there.

“Please accept my most sincere apologies for having caused any problems”, he wrote in a statement submitted to the court in Hamburg on January 11.

Mr Loth, who resides in Port Charlotte, Florida, made headlines when he took the stand on November 12 and publicly forgave Bruno Dey, who stands accused of aiding and abetting the murder of 5,230 prisoners at Stutthof between 1944 and 1945.

“Watch out everyone, I’m going to forgive him,” he declared, before bending down towards the wheelchair-bound Nazi and hugging him.

Mr Loth said in his testimony that his mother, Helene, became pregnant with him while she was incarcerated at Stutthof.

She was transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where she gave birth to him and where he was subjected to medical experiments. Mother and son were subsequently shuttled back to Stutthof.

Previously, Mr Loth had also submitted documents to Yad Vashem, claiming that his Jewish grandmother, Anna, had been gassed to death at Stutthof.

But none of the above was true, Der Spiegel found.

He was in fact born Peter Oswald Loth on September 2, 1943 in a normal hospital in Tiegenhof, today Nowy Dwór, Gdanski — known at the time as Danzig.

No medical experiments were conducted there.

His mother and grandmother, all written records indicate, were not Jewish but Protestant.

Helene was indeed imprisoned briefly at Stutthof, though prison records state her nationality as “R.D.”, meaning Reichsdeutsche, an ethnic German living in the German Reich

Helene was held there for four weeks and released on April 1, 1943, months prior to Loth’s birth.

His grandparents lived in nearby Fürstenwerder, or Zuławki today. This is where, according to an addendum to her marriage certificate, Anna died on August 30, 1943.

Had Anna been Jewish, her son, Gustav, would neither have become a member of the Waffen-SS nor attained the rank of Rottenführer, corporal.

Der Spiegel also found irregularities in his written submissions to the court. Mr Loth had claimed he had been tattooed in Stutthof as a child and later had it removed. He had never received such a tattoo.

Stepping away from the case, he claimed that “all the things I said in the trial are true, to the best of my knowledge”, adding that he had spent decades researching his family history.

He pushed back against what he termed a “media circus of false accusations”.

The trial of Bruno Dey is perhaps the last of suspected Nazi criminals.

He is charged with accessory to murder, the legal proposition that to be present at a concentration camp is to be complicit in the Holocaust that was used to convict John Demjanjuk in 2011 and Oskar Gröning, the so-called “Accountant of Auschwitz”, in 2014.

More than 60,000 people died at Stutthof, where Bruno Dey was a guard.

In December, the 93-year-old defendant testified that though he had observed people being taken to the gas chambers, he neither shot nor was violent towards any prisoners.

His job, he said, was to watch the perimeter fence to ensure no one escaped.

Bruno Dey reiterated that he had been a conscript.

“In my heart, I was not an SS man”, he told the court. “I do not see myself as guilty”.

The trial continues. A verdict is not expected before the end of February.