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| Auschwitz guard entreated by survivor to reveal role on first day of trial | |
| (about 7 hours later) | |
| A 94 year old former Auschwitz concentration camp guard has gone on trial in western Germany accused of being an accessory to the murders of 170,000 victims of the Holocaust. | |
| Reinhold Hanning, a retired dairy farmer, walked unaided into the court in Detmold dressed in a tweed jacket and glasses and gazed at the floor as he listened attentively to the proceedings. | |
| He did not react as Leon Schwarzbaum, a 94 year old survivor of Auschwitz who lives in Berlin, read out an account of his own time in the Nazi death camp, which covers the time Hanning was a guard there. | |
| Schwarzbaum looked directly at Hanning and delivered an emotional plea. | |
| “Mr Hanning, we are more or less the same age, and soon we will both be before the highest court,” he said. “Speak here about what you and your comrades did.” His hands and the paper he was holding trembled as he spoke in a shaky voice. | |
| When first questioned by investigators, Hanning admitted that he had served in the so-called Auschwitz I part of the camp, located in the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Oswiecim, but denied having spent any time working at the notorious Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million people who lost their lives there were slaughtered. | |
| But the trial opened with lawyers for Hanning filing a motion asking the judge to omit that statement from his testimony, as he had originally been taken aback when the investigators had knocked on his door and had not been fully aware that what he said would be used as part of a criminal investigation. It was unclear whether his defence team wanted to make the point that Hanning did not serve at the camp at all. There was no reaction from the judges as to how they would react to the motion. | |
| The court heard that Hanning had served as a guard in two separate SS Totenkopf or Death’s Head companies in Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944. Their specific role had been to guard prisoners who were being deployed as slave labour outside the camp. They were also moved to Birkenau to work on processing the more than 430,000 prisoners who arrived from Hungary in the so-called ‘Hungarian Action’ during May and July 1944, and were systematically loaded from trains onto a ramp from where they were stripped of their possessions and selected for labour or for the gas chambers. More than 300,000 were gassed on arrival. | |
| Prosecutors argue that through his very involvement in those companies, Hanning, who they say voluntarily joined the Waffen SS, the armed wing of the Nazi party, at the age of 18, directly contributed to the Nazi killing machine. | |
| Hanning fought in eastern Europe at the start of the war before his transfer to Auschwitz in January 1942. | |
| The court will hear the testimony of other former prisoners. Thirty-eight joint plaintiffs from Hungary, Israel, Britain, Canada, the United States and Germany are also following the trial. | |
| Due to Hanning’s age and frailty, doctors have said the daily court sessions should not be longer than two hours. | |
| The trial is one of four of other SS due to take place this year, with the others involving two other former male SS sergeants and a woman, all of whom are alleged to have served at Auschwitz. They reflect the last-minute scramble by German judicial authorities to bring the last remaining Nazis to trial, after decades in which many were allowed to escape justice. Of 6500 SS members who are known to have served at Auschwitz, only 29 were ever brought to trial in Germany. In the former communist East, 20 were prosecuted. Most escaped justice because of the belief that prevailed until recently, that anyone who had served under the Nazis had been forced to do so by the regime, and was therefore not guilty. | |
| But following the 2011 trial of John Demjanjuk, a car mechanic from Ohio, USA, who was convicted for simply being a guard without any evidence that he had been directly involved in any killings, a new precedent was set. The same argument was used to convict Oskar Groning (umlaut over o) last year, another former Auschwitz guard who was nicknamed the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” because of his responsibility for sorting through the money stolen from prisoners on arrival. | |
| Ahead of Hanning’s trial, Auschwitz survivors held a press conference in which they stressed the importance that the trial was taking place. | |
| “This trial should have happened 40, 50 years ago,” said 90-year-old Justin Sonder, a German who survived Auschwitz, as reported by Deutsche Welle. | |
| One of the co-plaintiffs, Erna de Vries, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 aged 23, told Reuters ahead of the trial: “I am not hateful, but it somehow feels like justice to see this man, who was working there [Auschwitz] when my mother died, on trial”. | |
| Outside the court in Detmold this morning spectators tried to shout down an 87 year old woman who has twice been convicted of Holocaust denial – a criminal offence in Germany. Police had to intervene to protect Ursula Haverbeck who is popular in far-right circles, and has previously claimed that Auschwitz was not a death camp, only a labour camp. | |
| The trial resumes on Friday with further testimony expected from Schwarzbaum. |