Former guard at Auschwitz goes on trial
A 94-year-old former SS sergeant goes on trial in Germany on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, based on accusations that he served as a guard in the Auschwitz death camp.
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 Thursday in Germany, even as a survivor directly urged him to break his silence.
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.
“Mr. Hanning, we are nearly the same age, and soon we will stand before the highest judge,” said Leon Schwarzbaum, 94, who took the stand as a coplaintiff. “I would like to call on you to tell us the historical truth.” But Hanning declined to speak.
Prosecutors say that Hanning served as a member of the SS at the camp in 1943 and 1944. The Nazis carried out mass 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.
More than three-quarters of the prisoners were marched di- rectly from the railway cars to the gas chambers at the camp, the prosecution said.
Hanning admitted during questioning after his 2014 arrest that he had served as a guard at the camp, but he said that he was not involved in the killings there.
His defense team asked the court 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.
Prosecutors have built their case on the dates 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.
“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.