11Feb 2016 popherald.com
Auschwitz survivor makes emotional plea to former SS guard at trial
Alicia Cross

The trial of a former Nazi concentration camp guard who worked at Auschwitz during WWII, has begun in Germany.

Reinhold Hanning, 93, is alleged to have joined Adolf Hitler's Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary organisation at the age of 18, taking part in battles in eastern Europe before becoming a guard at the camp in 1942. Hanning's attorney, Johannes Salmen, says that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed. DETMOLD, Germany (AP) — A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard is going on trial on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder in western Germany, accused of serving in the death camp at a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were gassed. An 87-year-old grandmother convicted for Holocaust denial seeks to attend the trial of a former SS guard in Auschwitz, Reinhold Hanning, who is charged with at least 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, but the elderly lady is taken away by police after she comes under attack, national news agency DPA reports. Accused by the prosecutor's office in Dortmund as well as by 38 joint plaintiffs from Hungary, Israel, Canada, Britain, the United States and Germany, Hanning will hear the testimony of former camp inmates in court. Another witness, Erna de Vries, was saved from the gas chamber and transferred to a labour camp. She said: "I survived, but up until today I don't know how exactly my mother was killed". "I am not hateful but it somehow feels like justice to see this man, who was working there when my mother died, on trial". "Without these people and their active support for the Holocaust, what happened in Auschwitz, the murder of 1.1 million people in just a few years, would not have been possible", said Orosz, who was born in Auschwitz just over a month before it was liberated on January 27, 1945. Hanning admitted to his guard duties at Auschwitz in a statement to the prosecution, however he denies any involvement in the mass killings. The man is accused of a third wave of late proceedings commenced with the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at Sobibor and that past year Oskar Gröning, former accountant of Auschwitz. His trial will be the first of four such court cases that could be the last due to the age of the defendants. Doctors have advised that the trial sessions can run no longer than two hours, in deference to Hanning's age and health. But Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, responsible for war crime investigations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said from his office in Jerusalem that age should not be an obstacle to prosecution.

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