Reinhold Hanning served as an SS guard in Auschwitz for two years after volunteering for the Waffen SS at the age of 18.
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Prosecutors argued that Hanning’s actions “contributed to the extermination aim of the camp”.
The defence had said Hanning should be acquitted as the former SS officer had personally never killed, beaten or abused anyone.
The plaintiffs said in a statement that the trial was “a big, even though a late, step towards a just examination of the mass murders in Auschwitz”, because it focused on the division of labor at the camp. She also confronted Hanning directly when he refused to speak throughout the trial.
“He was in Auschwitz for almost two and half years and thus supported the mass murder”, said the judge. Tell us! Tell us!
A 94-year-old witness said to the accused, “Mr Hanning, we are virtually the same age and soon we will face our final judge”. But in April, as the trial entered its fourth, and final, month, Hanning broke his silence.
Of more than 6,500 former SS personnel at Auschwitz who survived World War II, fewer than 50 have been convicted of atrocities by the German justice system. “The trial brings to the forefront, once again, what people are capable of doing to one another, and what incitement against minorities can lead to”. “You were part of a criminal organization and took part in criminal activity”, she said. Clues leading to about 30 suspects in late 2013 came from the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, which made a major push to identify former death camp guards after the conviction of John Demjanjuk in 2011 for his role in the murders of almost 30,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Poland.
Reinhold Hanning served an SS guard at Auschwitz during Nazi-occupied Poland between January 1943 and June 1944.
A similar case was made in 2015 against former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening, who was convicted of 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.
While Hanning has denied any role in the killings, he did offer an apology in court and said he “wished he had never been there”.
Hanning has admitted to being aware of the mass executions that occurred at the camp, but that he did nothing to stop it. Auschwitz was located in southern Poland and housed the killing of about 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews. “If the cases will make it to trial, that’s hard to say”. Five cases remain active.
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“Now it is a race against time”, Jens Rommel, director of Germany’s Central Investigation Center for Nazi Crimes, told NBC News. “I am almost 95 years old and still I often have nightmares about this”.
