Former Auschwitz Guard Apologizes at Trial in Germany
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Version 0 of 1. BERLIN — A 94-year-old former SS guard on Friday told a German court that he was “sincerely sorry” for failing to do anything to prevent the suffering and deaths of tens of thousands of prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp, breaking his silence after weeks of sitting motionless in the face of pleas by survivors for him to speak. In a statement read into a microphone from his wheelchair, the defendant, Reinhold Hanning, said he “deeply regretted” having belonged to a criminal organization that was responsible for the deaths of many innocent people and the destruction and suffering of countless victims and their families. “I am ashamed that I witnessed injustice and allowed it to continue without taking any actions against it,” Mr. Hanning told the court in the North Rhine-Westphalia city of Detmold, WDR, a public broadcaster, reported. “I am sincerely sorry.” Mr. Hanning is charged with being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people who perished at the concentration camp in Poland, which was occupied by the Germans during World War II. The charges pertain to his role as part of the Nazi killing machine at Auschwitz during his service as a guard at the camp, from January 1942 to June 1944. Before Mr. Hanning read his statement, his lawyer read from a 22-page summary of Mr. Hanning’s youth and how he came to be at Auschwitz. He said that Mr. Hanning had joined the Waffen SS at the urging of his stepmother, but that he had never wanted to serve anywhere but on the front lines. But he was transferred to noncombat service as a guard at Auschwitz after suffering an injury fighting on the Eastern Front. When he first arrived at Auschwitz, he was not aware of what was taking place at the camp, Mr. Hanning said in the statement read by his lawyer, Johannes Salmen. “Nobody talked to us about it in the first days there, but if someone, like me, was there for a long time then one learned what was going on,” the statement said, according to The Associated Press. “People were shot, gassed and burned. I could see how corpses were taken back and forth or moved out. I could smell the burning bodies; I knew corpses were being burned.” That information is important because Mr. Hanning is one of dozens of former Auschwitz guards charged with accessory to murder in the wake of the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, which set a precedent in German law. The judge in the Demjanjuk trial found that it was impossible for anyone who served at a death camp to not to be considered a part of the Nazis’ machinery of mass murder, leading prosecutors to pursue charges against dozens of former guards, including Mr. Hanning. Given their advanced age, many of the former guards have been ruled too frail to stand trial. Some, like the 93-year-old defendant who was to go on trial in Hanau this month, have died before the proceedings could open. Last July, a court convicted Oskar Gröning, a former soldier at Auschwitz, and sentenced him to four years in prison. Throughout Mr. Hanning’s trial, survivors of the death camp who have taken the witness stand have called on Mr. Hanning to break his silence. About 40 survivors have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law. Until Friday, Mr. Hanning had largely kept his head bowed and his mouth drawn in a firm line, even when faced with appeals like those from Angela Orosz, who survived Auschwitz as an infant. “People like you, Mr. Hanning, made the hell of Auschwitz possible!” Ms. Orosz, 71, testified in February, shortly after the trial opened. “People who looked on and took part, without asking any questions.” Although Mr. Hanning said in his statement that he also served as a guard in a tower, where he was under orders to shoot prisoners trying to escape, he gave no details about whether he ever shot anyone or was involved in specific killings at Auschwitz, where nearly a million Jews and tens of thousands of others perished. Such omissions left Leon Schwarzbaum, who survived Auschwitz but lost his family at the death camp, feeling dissatisfied. “He should say more,” Mr. Schwarzbaum told reporters. Not because it would affect his punishment — “God will punish him,” he said — but because survivors and their descendants deserved an explanation. |