Justice

Auschwitz guard Hanning: Guilty or not?

In Detmold, the judgment is about a former Auschwitz guard to fall. Reinhold Henning is accused of abetting mass murder. He could be the last one that is drawn because of the Nazi atrocities to justice.

You could be as an SS man in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, without the hundred thousand-fold murder, at the least, complicit? Since February of this year, the regional court of Detmold, trying to find an answer to this question – more than 70 years after the end of the Nazi dictatorship.

Germany’s justice people such as Reinhold Hanning left for decades undisturbed. Of about 6000, after the war, surviving Auschwitz were servants of only about 800 convicted – most before the Polish courts. In the Federal Republic there were a total of 43. Long the view: Only those who demonstrated a direct involvement in killings or ill-treatment, had to answer before the court – was in Germany a proof of that could rarely be provided.

Better late than never

The turning point came only in 2011: Even without such evidence, the district court of Munich sentenced the former SS-man John Demjanjuk for complicity in the murder of Thousands of cases. For the court it was sufficient that Demjanjuk was in the Sobibór extermination camp as a guard. However, the judgment was never final. Demjanjuk died before the Federal court could decide on its Revision.

So like John Demjanjuk also Reinhold Hanning sees himself only as a “small wheel in the gear”. In 1942 he had been “at the service” after Auschwitz offset, after he had been wounded in one of the front. As a member of the military battalion of the then 20-Year-old should ensure that no prisoner escapes. Hanning has admitted early on by the mass murder known. It been involved, he, however, never to this statement Hanning and his lawyers.

“Annihilation by the living conditions”

At the end, but that could be completely irrelevant. Because the chamber of Commerce in Detmold has already let on: The mass murder in Auschwitz was more than the Select on the ramp or the introduction of Zyklon B in the gas chambers. He also included the “destruction of the conditions of life”, as it says in the indictment. In other words: Through hard work in only insufficient diet, thousands of prisoners were murdered systematically – not only through the use of revolver bullets or poison gas.

As a security guard Reinhold Hanning has helped to keep the death machine of Auschwitz on the Run. During the process he admitted his moral guilt: “I deeply regret to have a criminal Organisation, for the deaths of many people. I am ashamed that I see wrong eye can have done.“

On Friday decide whether Hanning in a legal sense, guilty.