Auschwitz guard on trial for assisting in 170,000 murders in concentration camps

Dot Mediano Friday, February 12, 2016

Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former guard at Auschwitz, arrives with his lawyers Andreas Scharmer (L) and Johannes Salmen in the courtroom for the second day of his trial in Detmold, Germany, February 12, 2016. | REUTERS/Bernd Thissen

A 94-year-old former Auschwitz concentration camp guard has gone on trial in western Germany accused of being an accessory to the murders of 170,000 Holocaust victims.

According to CNN, Reinhold Hanning was a former Nazi SS guard who allegedly assisted in the deaths in parts of Poland that were invaded by Hitler from 1943 to 1944. He has reportedly denied he had participated in the killings.

Survivor, Leon Schwarzbaum, stood on the witness stand and gave his own recollection of what happened during the Holocaust. He said that he would always see lorries packed with naked people regardless of gender, being delivered to Auschwitz to be gassed.

Prosecutors said Hanning voluntarily joined the SS army at the age of 18 and battled in Eastern Europe until he was transferred to Auschwitz.

He now faces multiple accounts of murders where an estimate of 1.1 million Jews, Poles, handicapped and homosexual people were slaughtered during the Second World War, The Guardian reported. Those who were not chosen to be gassed either died from exhaustion from work, starvation, and disease.

According to The Irish Times, Schwarzbaum recalled that Hanning was familiar with the killing methods because executions were only upheld by Nazi military soldiers.

While the former Nazi SS guard admitted to his guard duties in the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Oświęcim during the World War, he denied to ever be assigned in the Birkenau section, where the concentration camps were located. However, investigators said he served at the subdivision where 90% of the killings took place.

Hanning is one of four cases that will be tried over the course of the year. As German officials push for justice, only 29 were prosecuted out of the 6,500 cases presented last year. The former bookkeeper of Auschwitz, Oskar Groening, was sentenced to four years in prison last week after being charged as guilty by a court in Lueneberg, Germany, with being an accessory to the genocide of 300,000 people.