Leon Schwarzbaum, who lost 35 family members during the Holocaust, calmly recalled the camp’s horrors and when he had finished he directly addressed the accused, Reinhold Hanning, also 94, on the first day of his trial.
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Two former SS men will go on trial this month for their alleged complicity in the murder of thousands of people at Auschwitz, as Germany accelerates its bid to prosecute ageing Third Reich criminals.
Hanning was 20 years old in 1942 when he started serving as a guard at the Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland where more than 1.1 million Jews were killed by the Nazis.
A precedent was set for such charges to be brought in 2011 when former OH car-worker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany exclusively for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.
Reinhold H.’s attorney, Johannes Salmen, told the AP news agency that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at Auschwitz II, the Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed.
He said those companies were used to guard prisoners used as slave laborers outside the camp, and also were called to Birkenau to help with the tens of thousands being brought in during the so-called “Hungarian action” in 1944 and unloaded from trains onto a ramp.
Prosecutors in Hanning’s case say all who participated in the administration of Auschwitz are responsible for the deaths, particularly in the so-called “Hungarian action” of 1944.
Last year, 94-year-old Oskar Groening, known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, was sentenced for being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people in Auschwitz.
There was a heavy police presence around the court in the western town of Detmold as Hanning walked in, wearing glasses and a dark brown tweed jacket and looking at the ground, for a session limited to just two hours due to his age.
“He’s a just old man like me”.
“Even 71 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the wounds of the survivors are still fresh”.
No pleas are entered in the German system. But “that doesn’t in any way change the validity of what’s happening now”. “If they had died five years ago they would never have been going to trial”.
“I want to call on you to tell the historical truth”.
Hanning, like Demjanjuk, was a camp guard, and stands accused of having watched over the selection of which prisoners were fit for labour, and which should be sent to gas chambers.
His trial will be the first of four such cases that could be the last due to the age of the defendants.
Hanning faces between three and 15 years in jail, but in view of his advanced age and the period required for any appeals, he is unlikely to serve time.
Accused by prosecutors in Dortmund and 38 complainants from Hungary, Israel, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and Germany, Hanning will face accounts of camp survivors who witnessed the killings.
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The 90-year-old said: “I’m often asked if there were SS men in Auschwitz who showed compassion”.
