‘LAST NAZI’
Former SS officer jailed for five years
He does not flinch. Former SS guard Reinhold Hanning sits in his wheelchair, in his grey suit, vest and tie, and seems not to care as dozens of flashbulbs explode metres from his slightly crooked face.
The 94-year-old widower remains equally unflustered when the young female judge recaps the horrific atrocities that occurred at Auschwitz-Birkenau under his watch. And he betrays no emotion when she denounces his claims of ignorance and sentences him to five years as an accessory to the murder of 170,000 Jews at the death camp in 194344.
Does this retired dairy owner realize he’s likely to go down in history as the last Nazi to be convicted in Germany, unlucky enough to have outlived so many others?
I can’t stop staring at him. I have been close to evil in the past, I have sat behind serial killers and child murderers, but never so near to a Nazi who once proudly wore the SS uniform on the Auschwitz ramp where almost everyone in my father’s family was marched to their deaths.
He considered my relatives and I subhuman, useless vermin who had to be exterminated for the greater good. So how can Hanning look just like an ordinary man? The banality of evil indeed.
“If he was a brave man wearing an SS uniform, now when he’s close to his grave, can he be as brave?” said Toronto Holocaust survivor Max Eisen.
For fellow survivor Bill Glied, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about Hanning any more. This is about a court in Germany finally confronting the country’s dark past, finally righting decades of judicial indifference that allowed ex-Nazis like Hanning to live out their days in comfort and peace.
Glied, 85, admitted wrestling with his emotions as Judge Anke Grudda, in an impassioned hour-long judgment acknowledged the pain he and his fellow survivors described in their harrowing testimonies this year.
“The arbitrary terror was boundless and without any mercy,” she said, admitting their memories often left her trembling. “They were always on the brink of death.”
He wanted to cheer as she chastised her predecessors for not doing more to bring Hanning’s comrades to justice.
“Why has it taken over 70 years for the defendant to be put on trial?” she demanded. “The answer is as simple as it is shocking — German society did not want to deal with the injustice of the Holocaust.”
It is only in the last few years, thanks to the John Demjanjuk conviction in 2011, that Germany has begun to pursue lower-ranking SS officers as accessories to murder, even without direct evidence they participated in specific killings.
In Hanning’s 2½ years at Auschwitz, where he was promoted twice, he was a cog in the wheel of torture, ensuring Jews were gassed, or worked to death or starved on 300 calories a day.
“This is the very least that our society can do to give survivors of the Holocaust at least a semblance of justice, even 70 years after the crime. even with a 94-year-old defendant,” the judge said.
“The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killer; Old age is no excuse,” said Efraim Zuroff, lead Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel. “These are people who are least deserving of any sympathy because they showed no sympathy to their victims, including people who were as old as they are now.”
No one expects Hanning to serve even one day in prison because of the appeals process.
“I can never forget, I can never forgive,” said Eisen, whose parents and three siblings were killed at the death camp in German-occupied Poland. “But it’s a precedent for future perpetrators and an important message: you just can’t get away with murder.”
But so many have. Munich historian Andreas Eichmuller says 6,500 SS men at Auschwitz survived the war, but fewer than 100 were ever tried and only 50 were convicted.
Born Dec. 28, 1921, Hanning left school at 14 to work in a bicycle factory and volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1940. He fought in the Netherlands, Yugoslavia and Russia before being injured by grenade splinters in Kyiv in 1941. On Jan. 21, 1943, he was transferred to guard duty at Auschwitz.
He could have volunteered to go back to the front at any time, the judge said. Instead, Hanning remained at Auschwitz.
“For 2½ years, you watched as people were murdered in gas chambers,” she said. “For 2½ years, you watched as people were shot. For 2½ years, you watched as people starved to death.”
Hanning’s claims he was never in that part of the camp were “unbelievable,” the judge went on. “You had an important function. With your guard duties, you ensured a seamless performance of the killing machine.”
Offered the opportunity to speak, Hanning remained silent. And so this historic Nazi trial came to an end.
THE PASSAGE OF TIME IN NO WAY DIMINISHES THE GUILT OF THE KILLER ... THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE LEAST DESERVING OF ANY SYMPATHY BECAUSE THEY SHOWED NO SYMPATHY TO THEIR VICTIMS, INCLUDING PEOPLE WHO WERE AS OLD AS THEY ARE NOW. — EFRAIM ZUROFF