Hanning said he had never spoken about his role at the concentration camp to his wife, his children or his grandchildren.
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Reinhold Hanning told the Detmold state court Friday that he had never talked about his service in Auschwitz from January 1942 to June 1944, even to family, but wanted to use his trial as an opportunity to apologize.
“I’m ashamed that I knowingly let injustice happen and did nothing to oppose it”, said Reinhold Hanning, a former Nazi SS officer, seated in a wheelchair in the court in Detmold. “I am truly sorry”, said the white-haired, bespectacled widower, who owned a dairy store after the war.
Prosecutors, including those in Dortmund and 40 joint plaintiffs from Hungary, Israel, Canada, Britain, US and others in Germany have accused Hanning of facilitating the deaths of at least 170,000 people in Auschwitz, which housed around 1.2 million prisoners, mostly Jews. The apology is not enough, says Auschwitz survivor Leon Schwarzbaum, who was in the courtroom for Hanning’s statement.
His lawyer read a statement by Hanning saying he did not know what occurred at Auschwitz when he first arrived, but learned early on about the massacres there. He fought in several battles during the World War but was injured by a grenade in 1941.
A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard on trial in Germany apologised in court to victims on Friday, telling them he regretted being part of a “criminal organisation” that had killed so many people and caused such suffering.
“People were shot, gassed and burned”.
Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered during his time there.
“I’m of the opinion that every member of the guard battalion knew what was going on”. I could see how corpses were taken back and forth and moved out. “I knew corpses were being burned”.
In this 22-page long declaration, Hanning admitted having known about mass murder in the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Indeed, “I’ve tried my whole life to forget about this time”, he said.
Until five year ago, evidence that defendants were directly involved in the killings at the death camps was required in order to convict them. “Auschwitz was a nightmare”. When the trial began in February he denied knowing what went on in the camp, now he denies only the prosecution claim that he worked on the selection ramps in the Birkenau death camp.
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Last July a 93-year-old man, Oskar Gröning, was given a four-year sentence for complicity in the murder of 300,000 people in Auschwitz.
