Defendant Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former guard at Auschwitz death camp, holds a glass of water as he sits in a courtroom before the continuation of his trial in Detmold, Germany, May 20, 2016.
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Hanning’s trial came on the heels of a high-profile case a year ago against Oskar Gröning, dubbed the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”.
The prosecution had sought six years imprisonment, claiming Hanning had watched over how prisoners were selected for the gas chambers and accused him of being aware of the regular mass shooting of inmates at the camp, as well as the systematic starvation of prisoners.
Rommel said even though every trial is widely dubbed “the last” by the media, his office still plans on giving more cases to prosecutors and politicians have pledged to keep his office open until 2025. They argue that he helped facilitate the death camp function by escorting some prisoners who arrived at the camp to the gas chambers, according to the Associated Press. He has said he knew what was going on at the camp but did not act to stop it.
But he said he had been “silent all my life” about the atrocities because he was ashamed, and had never spoken a word about it to his wife, children or grandchildren.
Several equally elderly Auschwitz survivors testified at the trial about their own experiences, and were among about 40 survivors or their families who joined the process as co-plaintiffs as allowed under German law. I simply could not talk about it.
The Nazis killed about 1.1 million people at Auschwitz in occupied southern Poland. Yet, of the camp’s 6,500 SS personnel who survived the war, fewer than 50 were ever convicted.
But the legal foundation for prosecuting ex-Nazis changed in 2011 with the German conviction of former death camp guard John Demjanjuk, exclusively on the basis of his having worked at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.
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He was sentenced not for atrocities he was known to have committed, but on the basis that he served at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland – for having been a cog in the Nazis’ killing machine.
