A 94-year-old former SS sergeant on trial over his actions at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp may make history as one of the last former Nazis to face his crimes.

Reinhold Hanning stands accused in a German court of selecting inmates to be killed and participating in mass shootings during a period in 1943 and 1944 when the Nazis carried out a mass slaughter of Jews from Hungary. According to the prosecutor, Hanning can be connected to the deaths of 170,000 people, most of them Jews. He acknowledges working as a guard at the camp, but denies the charges. At the opening of his trial Thursday he remained silent, refusing pleas from a survivor to “tell us the historical truth.”

We must send the message that those who contributed to it will be held accountable, even if it takes 70 years to do so and the guilty have grown frail.

For practical reasons, Nazi prosecutions have largely been on the decline in recent decades: The number of victims and witnesses has declined as time has passed, making it harder to present first-hand evidence against the remaining participants in the Holocaust. That began to shift in 2011 with the successful conviction of John Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk was a member of the Red Army who was captured by the Germans in 1942. At some point in 1944, he testified, he joined a Nazi unit of Russian soldiers opposed to Communist rule. Prosecutors disputed that account, presenting evidence that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland and was implicated in the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews.

After the war, Demjanjuk immigrated to the U.S. with his family and took a job as an auto mechanic in Cleveland, Ohio. He remained free until the 1980s, when Israel successfully extradited and convicted him of being “Ivan the Terrible” — a notoriously brutal Nazi. That conviction was overturned when the real Ivan the Terrible turned up elsewhere.

It was not until 2011 that Demjanjuk was tried again on new evidence and convicted for serving as a guard at Sobibor, setting an extraordinary precedent for such cases. The court ruled that although it had no evidence connecting him to the death of a specific person, his job as a guard offered enough reason to link him with the killings of about 30,000 people.

Demjanjuk died a year later at the age of 91. Since then, with the evidentiary bar lowered, there has been a steady uptick in prosecutions. Since April 2014, German prosecutors have pursued at least 30 other cases against former Auschwitz guards. One of the most notorious among these was that of Oskar Gröning, charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. He was known as the accountant of Auschwitz, for his habit of stealing money from prisoners and turning it over to SS headquarters.

This wave has not been without controversy in Germany. Many of the men now facing trial are in their 90s. They’re frail. They’ve lived peaceful post-war lives. Several have claimed they weren’t directly involved in killings and that the new standard fails to consider personal circumstances at the time of the war.

According to Efraim Zuroff, who’s earned the moniker the world’s last “Nazi hunter,” if Germany had applied the broader legal standard it adopted with Demjanjuk’s case, many more SS guards would have stood trial.

“It is unfortunate that this proactive approach has only been applied so many years after the end of World War II,” he told the Jerusalem Post.

The Holocaust was so unprecedented, so heinous that society must respond to it with an unwavering commitment to see justice done. We must send the message that those who contributed to it will be held accountable, even if it takes 70 years to do so and the guilty have grown frail.

The Nazi regime offered no humanity and no mercy. These last lingering collaborators offer us an opportunity to set an example for those who would have claimed the defence: “It wasn’t us. We weren’t involved. We were just following orders.”

nationalpost.com