FEB. 11, 2016 nytimes.com
Trial of Reinhold Hanning, Ex-Auschwitz Guard, Opens in Germany
By MELISSA EDDY

BERLIN — Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former Nazi charged with being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people who perished at a concentration camp in Poland, refused to make any statements as his trial opened on Thursday in Germany, even as a survivor directly urged him to break his silence.

Mr. Hanning, a bespectacled, white-haired former SS sergeant at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, who was declared healthy enough to stand trial, sat attentive as the charges against him were read in court in the northern city of Detmold.

But he declined to speak, even when addressed by a survivor. “Mr. Hanning, we are nearly the same age, and soon we will stand before the highest judge,” said Leon Schwarzbaum, 94, from Berlin, who took the stand as a co-plaintiff. “I would like to call on you to tell us the historical truth.”

 Prosecutors say that Mr. Hanning served as a member of the SS at the camp in 1943 and 1944. The Nazis carried out mass-scale killings of Jews brought from Hungary directly to the camp, and the prosecutors have said that he must have been aware of the gas chambers in his capacity as a guard.

More than three-quarters of the prisoners were marched directly from the railway cars to the gas chambers at the camp, the prosecution said.

Mr. Hanning admitted during questioning after his arrest in 2014 that he had served as a guard at the camp, but he said that he was not involved in the killings there.

His defense team asked the court on Thursday to disallow that statement, obtained during the questioning, arguing that he was surprised and still in shock from the police search of his home.

Prosecutors have built their case on the dates Mr. Hanning served in the camp and on the number of people who died during that time, based on information gleaned from meticulous records kept by the Nazis.

“The accused was aware of the many different methods used to kill,” Andreas Brendel, a state prosecutor in Detmold, told the court while reading out the charges.

The trial is one of four linked to Auschwitz that are expected to begin this year, as the German authorities make a belated push to bring elderly war criminals to justice. Two other former SS guards are scheduled to stand trial, as well as an elderly woman accused of working in the camp as a teenager.

The prosecutions follow a shift in the legal interpretation of the law after the conviction in Germany in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a former autoworker in Ohio who was a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.

As a result, service in any capacity at an extermination camp is sufficient grounds to open an investigation on suspicion of accessory to murder.

A court in Lüneburg, Germany, found another former SS soldier, Oskar Gröning, who was 94 at the time, guilty of complicity in July in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews during his time at Auschwitz.

Several other survivors of Auschwitz, all of them well into their 90s, are expected to testify against Mr. Hanning. The judge has scheduled 12 sessions, which must be limited to two hours a day because of the defendant’s fragile health.

nytimes.com