94yo ex-SS guard on trial in late push to punish Nazi death camp crimes

A 94-year-old former SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp is going on trial tomorrow on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, the first of up to four cases being brought to court this year in an 11th-hour push by German prosecutors to punish Nazi war crimes. Reinhold Hanning is accused of serving as an SS Unterscharfuehrer — similar to a sergeant — in Auschwitz from January 1943 to June 1944, a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were brought to the camp in cattle cars and were gassed to death. The trial for the retiree from a town near the western city of Detmold is one of the latest that follow a precedent set in 2011, when former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.

In a certain sense, you could say these people had the bad luck to live a long life. If they had died five years ago they would never have been going to trial.

Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center

The Demjanjuk verdict vastly widened the number of possible prosecutions, establishing that simply helping the camp to function was sufficient to make one an accessory to the murders committed there. Prosecutors last year managed to use the same legal reasoning to successfully convict SS Unterscharfuehrer Oskar Groening, who served in Auschwitz, on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. Groening’s appeal is expected to be heard sometime this year. Hubert Zafke, 95, a former SS Oberscharfuehrer — roughly equivalent to a Sgt. 1st Class — is scheduled to go on trial at the end of February in Neubrandenburg, north of Berlin, on 3,681 counts of accessory to murder on accusations he served as a medic at an SS hospital in Auschwitz in 1944.

Nazi guard