Guilty verdict for 94-year-old ‘ last Nazi’
‘OLD AGE NO EXCUSE’ AS FORMER SS GUARD GETS 5 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 flash bulbs 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 1943-44.
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.
How remarkably uninterested he appears. Does he feel shame? Remorse? Does he worry about how he will ever have the time left to atone for his role in the murders of so many innocent souls?
“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 hourlong 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 injus- tice 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.
“It was late, very late, but t hankfully it comes in j ust enough time to provide some justice,” Grudda said.
Hanning must bear responsibility for his part in a Nazi system of industrialized mass murder. In his 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. He aided and abetted their slaughter. He prevented their escape.
Hanning is guilty, no matter his age.
“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-yearold 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. Instead, the importance lies in the symbolism of this verdict.
“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 his- torian Andreas Eichmuller says 6,500 SS personnel 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. “It’s not true that you didn’t have a choice.”
Instead, Hanning remained at Auschwitz death factory, complicit in the horrors that went on there every day.
“For 2 ½ years, you watched as people were murdered in gas chambers,” she said. “For 2 ½ years, you watched as people were shot. For 2 ½ 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.”
He was an accessory to the greatest crime against humanity and now Hanning is being held to account. Not because he is the devil, or the mastermind or even the worst of them. They all should have been prosecuted — but lucky for most, they enjoyed the indifference of their nation.
The message now has changed. There is no statute of limitations on aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of innocent people.
Offered the opportunity to speak, Hanning remained silent. And so this historic Nazi trial came to an end.
He was wheeled out of the courtroom as survivors embraced and wiped away their tears. In their testimonies, they had bravely revisited nightmares they had tried to bury. Now they were leaving Germany feeling all that pain had been truly recognized at last.
“I feel that my loved ones that were murdered finally got some j ustice, an acknowledgment against those who say, even today, that this never happened,” said Hedy Bohm, a Toronto Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz. “My murdered mother and father now, perhaps, can rest in peace.”
For Glied, there was victory enough that three generations of his family would witness the conviction of an ex-Nazi in the country that once sought to wipe all Jews off the earth.
“I feel immense elation that I’m sitting in a German court with my daughter and my granddaughter, which proves that we are the eternal phoenix that rises again from the Holocaust ashes,” he said.
And me? I left thinking about my late bubie and zaidi, my paternal grandparents, who always seemed haunted by the emptiness and the guilt of surviving when their entire families perished at the hands of the Nazis.
For them, and my relatives murdered by men just like Hanning, I hope this belated verdict is some small justice as well.
YOU WATCHED AS PEOPLE WERE MURDERED IN GAS CHAMBERS.