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Trial of Reinhold Hanning, Ex-Auschwitz Guard, Opens in Germany Trial of Reinhold Hanning, Ex-Auschwitz Guard, Opens in Germany
(about 4 hours later)
BERLIN — Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former Nazi charged with being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people who perished at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, went on trial on Thursday in a German court. BERLIN — Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former Nazi charged with being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people who perished at a concentration camp in Poland, refused to make any statements as his trial opened on Thursday in Germany, even as a survivor directly urged him to break his silence.
Mr. Hanning served as an SS sergeant at the camp, and he is accused of having met Jewish prisoners as they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on overcrowded rail cars. The bespectacled, white-haired former SS sergeant at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, who was declared healthy enough to stand trial, sat attentive as the charges against him were read out in the courtroom in the northern city of Detmold.
The German authorities are making a renewed push to bring elderly war criminals to justice, and Mr. Hanning is the first to face trial as part of that effort. “Mr. Hanning, we are nearly the same age, and soon we will stand before the highest judge,” said Leon Schwarzbaum, 94, from Berlin, who took the stand as a co-plaintiff. “I would like to call on you to tell us the historical truth.” But he declined to speak, even when addressed by a survivor.
He has admitted that he served at the camp in 1943 and 1944, but he has insisted that he was only a guard, that he did not harm anyone and that he was not aware of the existence of gas chambers. Prosecutors say that Mr. Hanning served as a member of the SS at the camp in 1943 and 1944. The Nazis carried out mass-scale killings of Jews brought from Hungary directly to the camp, and the prosecutors have said that he must have been aware of the gas chambers in his capacity as a guard.
Prosecutors have based their argument and the number of deaths on information gleaned from meticulous records the Nazis kept, which showed the large-scale operation that sent hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to the camp. More than three-quarters of the prisoners were marched directly from the railway cars to the gas chambers at the camp, the prosecution said.
The amount of time Mr. Hanning served at Auschwitz “indicates that he must have been aware of the killings with which we have charged him,” Andreas Brendel, the state prosecutor in Detmold, where the trial is being held, told the public broadcaster ARD. Mr. Hanning admitted during questioning after his arrest in 2014 that he had served as a guard at the camp, but he said that he was not involved in the killings there.
The legal interpretation of the law shifted after the conviction in Germany in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a former autoworker in Ohio who was a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. With that ruling, service in any capacity at an extermination camp is sufficient grounds to open an investigation on suspicion of accessory to murder. His defense team asked the court on Thursday to disallow that statement, obtained during the questioning, as evidence, arguing that he was surprised and still in shock from the police search of his home.
In July, a court in Lüneburg, Germany, found another former SS soldier, Oskar Gröning, who was 94 at the time, guilty of complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews during his time at Auschwitz. Prosecutors have built their case on the dates Mr. Hanning served in the camp and on the number of people who died during that time, based on information gleaned from meticulous records kept by the Nazis.
Several survivors of Auschwitz, all of them well into their 90s, are expected to testify against Mr. Hanning. The judge has scheduled 12 sessions, which must be limited to two hours a day because of the defendant’s fragile health. “The accused was aware of the many different methods used to kill,” Andreas Brendel, a state prosecutor in Detmold, told the court while reading out the charges.
The trial is one of four linked to Auschwitz that are expected to begin this year, as the German authorities make a belated push to bring elderly war criminals to justice. Two other former SS guards are scheduled to stand trial, as well as an elderly woman accused of working in the camp as a teenager.
The prosecutions follow a shift in the legal interpretation of the law after the conviction in Germany in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a former autoworker in Ohio who was a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.
As a result, service in any capacity at an extermination camp is sufficient grounds to open an investigation on suspicion of accessory to murder.
A court in Lüneburg, Germany, found another former SS soldier, Oskar Gröning, who was 94 at the time, guilty of complicity in July in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews during his time at Auschwitz.
Several other survivors of Auschwitz, all of them well into their 90s, are expected to testify against Mr. Hanning. The judge has scheduled 12 sessions, which must be limited to two hours a day because of the defendant’s fragile health.