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| Auschwitz guard guilty of 170,000 accessory to murder charges jailed for five years | Auschwitz guard guilty of 170,000 accessory to murder charges jailed for five years |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| A former guard at Nazi death camp Auschwitz has been found guilty on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder and sentenced to five years. | |
| Reinhold Hanning served at the camp in Poland during the Second World War between January 1942 and June 1944. He had faced a maximum sentence of 15 years. | |
| During his four-month trial, the 94-year-old admitted serving as an Auschwitz guard. He said he was ashamed that he was aware Jews were being killed but did nothing to try to stop it. | |
| Hanning's defence had called for an acquittal, saying there is no evidence he killed or beat anyone, while prosecutors sought a six-year sentence. | |
| "It disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organisation," he told the court in April. "I am ashamed that I saw injustice and never did anything about it and I apologise for my actions." | |
| Despite his age, Hanning has seemed alert during the four-month trial, paying attention to testimony and occasionally walking in to the courtroom on his own, though usually using a wheelchair. | |
| Leon Schwarzbaum, a 95-year-old Auschwitz survivor from Berlin who was used as slave labourer to help build a factory for Siemens outside the camp, told the court at the start of the trial that he regularly saw flames belching from the chimneys of the Auschwitz crematoria. | |
| "So much fire came out of the chimneys, no smoke, just fire," he told the court. "And that was burning people." | |
| According to the Associated Press the 94-year-old joined the Hitler Youth with his class in 1935 at age 13, then volunteered at 18 for the Waffen SS in 1940 at the urging of his stepmother. He fought in several battles in World War Two before being hit by grenade splinters in his head and leg during close combat in Kiev in 1941. | |
| Additional reporting by wires |