Ex-Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning (94) goes on trial over 170000 deaths

A former Auschwitz guard facing charges of accessory to the murder of 170,000 Hungarian Jews went on trial in Detmold, Germany on Thursday, the most recent in a sudden five-year-string of trials of former Nazis as prosecutors attempt to chase convictions for elderly suspects before the opportunity is gone for good.

Prosecutors argue that all guards helped the camp function and that during the so-called “Hungarian action” in 1944 – when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were shipped to the camp – nearly all were called upon to help deal with the vast numbers of people arriving at the killing complex in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Describing the SS as “cruel and sadistic”, Schwarzbaum said: “The older I get, the more time I have to think about what happened”.

Dressed in a tweed suit, the white-haired, bespectacled widower, who owned a dairy store after the war, kept his eyes trained on the table in front of him during the hearing, and left his lawyer to answer the judge’s questions.

Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, said it was an opportunity to make up “for the failures of Germany’s justice system”.

Auschwitz survivor Justin Sonder, who is scheduled to testify Friday, said it’s never too late to pursue those responsible for running the camps.

Since then, federal prosecutors have brought charges against a number of guards, most of whom are in their 90s.

“I was constantly afraid of dying from hunger or being selected (for the gas chamber)”, he told the court.

“The chimneys were spewing fire… the smell of burning human flesh was so unbelievable that one could hardly bear it”, 94-year-old Leon Schwarzbaum was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.

Hanning stands accused of having watched over the selection of which prisoners were fit for labour, and which should be sent to gas chambers. Prisoners were also shot to death or hanged. More than 1 million people died in Auschwitz alone during World War II. Despite the sudden uptick in trials after decades with nearly none, fewer than one half of one percent of SS members at Auschwitz have been convicted, according to a 2014 investigation from German newspaper Der Spiegel.

In Germany, a court case against Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former SS soldier, was recently opened on Thursday. The trial started Thursday.

Until recently, participation in the Holocaust was not a crime, and defendants could only be convicted for a specific provable act of murder or torture. The short daily running time in court is down to the defendant’s advanced age. Reinhold Hanning is being charged with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder between the years 1943 and 1944.

Groening’s appeal is expected to be heard sometime this year, but prosecutors are not waiting to move ahead with other cases. Of course, the ones that are still alive pretend that they didn’t know what was going on there, that they didn’t take part in any killings, and so on.