He said he had volunteered for the SS at age 18 and served in Auschwitz from January 1942 to June 1944 but claimed he was not involved in the killings in the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
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She said Hanning was a cog in a “perfectly functioning machinery” of destruction, helping operate the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where some 1.1 million people, primarily Jews, were killed.
But the documented roster evidence meant he was found guilty of complicity in mass murder at the Nazi death camp.
Hanning’s lawyers argued that he never killed, beat or mistreated anyone during his time there.
The verdict and sentence of Reinhold Hanning were handed down Friday afternoon from the district court in Detmold, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Germany is holding what are likely to be its last trials linked to the Holocaust, in which the Nazis killed more than six million people, mostly Jews.
Hanning’s case is similar to other trials of former Nazis that prosecutors in Germany have pursued more aggressively in recent years. She also confronted Hanning directly when he refused to speak throughout the trial. The number of murders in which Hanning was found to be complicit, 170,000, was determined by matching Hanning’s service records with transportation logs for Hungarian Jews. Visibly-disappointed Joshua Kaufman, 88, traveled to the trial from Los Angeles with two of his four daughters but the judge ruled his account would not have added new information to the proceedings.
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”. He also says he had remained silent because he was ashamed and because no one in his family knew he worked in the camp, according to RT.
“It disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organization”, he told the court in April.
Reinhold Hanning was found guilty of accessory to murder on June 17. Last year, another SS sergeant, Oskar Groening, was charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder for his time at Auschwitz using the same argument. Reinhold Hanning was sentenced to five years in prison.
Leon Schwarzbaum, a 95-year-old Auschwitz survivor from Berlin who was used as slave laborer to help build a factory for Siemens outside the camp, told the court at the start of the trial that he regularly saw flames belching from the chimneys of the Auschwitz crematoria.
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Ahead of the case, he told how he vividly remembers how the “chimneys were spewing fire… and the smell of burning human flesh was so unbelievable that one could hardly bear it”.
