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94 year old former Auschwitz guard goes on trial in Germany | 94 year old former Auschwitz guard goes on trial in Germany |
(about 2 hours later) | |
DETMOLD, Germany — A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard went on trial Thursday on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder in western Germany, accused of serving in the death camp at a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were gassed. | |
Former SS Sgt. Reinhold Hanning maintains that he served in a part of the Auschwitz camp complex where no gassings were taking place. Prosecutors argue that all guards helped the camp function, and that during the so-called “Hungarian action” in 1944 — when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were shipped to the camp — almost all were called upon to help deal with the vast numbers of people arriving at the killing complex in Nazi-occupied Poland. | |
The trial in Detmold was moved to the city’s chamber of industry and commerce to accommodate the large number of observers and reporters. There was also a heavy police presence in the city. | |
Leon Schwarzbaum, a 94-year-old Auschwitz survivor from Berlin, was scheduled to testify Thursday, the opening day of the trial. It is unclear whether Hanning will first make a statement. | |
Schwarzbaum, who was taken to the camp in 1943, told The Associated Press ahead of the trial that even though higher-ranking Nazis had escaped punishment in the decades after the war, going ahead with Hanning’s prosecution was the right thing to do. | |
“I think the people responsible for helping make the whole apparatus function, even if they were a tiny gear in the machine, should be convicted,” he said. | |
The trial for Hanning, a retiree from a town near the western city of Detmold, is one of the latest that follow a precedent set in 2011, when former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing. | |
Hanning’s attorney, Johannes Salmen, says that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed. | |
Prosecutor Andreas Brendel told the AP, however, that guards in the main camp were also used as on-call guards to augment those in Birkenau when trainloads of Jews were brought in. | |
“We believe that these auxiliaries were used in particular during the so-called Hungarian action in support of Birkenau,” he said. | |
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |