Ex-Auschwitz guard guilty of 170000 counts related to murder, court finds

The 94-year-old served at the camp in Poland during the Second World War between January 1942 and June 1944. He said he was ashamed that he was aware Jews were being killed but did nothing to try to stop it. Prosecutors, however, said he could be convicted for helping the camp operate.

“It is my dream to be in Germany, in a German court, with German judges acknowledging the Holocaust”, the 88-year-old said.

Mass now lives in an OAP home near Berlin and refuses to speak about her time at the death factory. “He did not kill or beat anyone himself”, attorney Johannes Salmen said, according to Bild newspaper. Tell us! Tell us!

He never denied being a guard there but denied killing anyone.

Gröning was sentenced in July to four years in prison, even though he had previously been cleared by German authorities after lengthy criminal probes dating back to the 1970s. “Why don’t you come clean and tell the truth for once about what you and your comrades did in Auschwitz?”

Hanning was “part of the daily and omnipresent horrors that were meted out to all the Jewish families and other Auschwitz prisoners”, said Christoph Heubner, the committee’s deputy executive president, national news agency DPA reported.

Angered by his silence, Angela Orosz, 71, who was born at the concentration camp in December 1944, flew from her home in Toronto, Canada, shortly after the start of the proceedings and took to the witness stand to urge him: “You know what happened to all the people”.

“It disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organization”. 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.

The former guard was not charged with direct involvement in the mass murder.

During the trial, Henning’s defense argued that his mere presence at the camp did not mean he was directly responsible for the murders.

On Friday, it was announced that Hanning had been convicted of 170,000 counts of accessory to murder. He has appealed against the sentence and is unlikely ever to serve any time.

Reinhold Hanning’s trial may be the last of its kind.

During the 20-day trial that dragged on over four months, the court heard testimony from around a dozen Holocaust survivors, many extremely elderly, who detailed horrific experiences, recalling piles of bodies and the smell of burnt flesh in Auschwitz.

However, those figures may reflect not just a desire for justice but also the realities of the Cold War, when the regime also used alleged fascist links to jail its critics and enemies in political trials, says Daniel Bonnard of Marburg University. Five cases remain active.

“Now it is a race against time”, Jens Rommel, director of Germany’s Central Investigation Center for Nazi Crimes, told NBC News.