By Kate Connolly|The Guardian

A 94-year-old former Auschwitz concentration camp guard has gone on trial in western Germany accused of being an accessory to the murders of 170,000 Holocaust victims.

Reinhold Hanning walked unaided into the court in Detmold wearing a tweed jacket and glasses and gazed at the floor as he listened attentively to the proceedings.
He did not react as 94-year-old survivor Leon Schwarzbaum read out an account of his own time in the Nazi death camp, which coincided with Hanning’s.
His hands trembling and his voice shaking, Schwarzbaum looked directly at Hanning and delivered an emotional plea: “Mr Hanning, we are virtually the same age and soon we will face our final judge. I would like to ask you to tell the historical truth here, just as I am. Tell the truth about what you and your colleagues did.”
Former Auschwitz SS guard Reinhold Hanning.
But Hanning, a retired dairy farmer who had volunteered for the Waffen SS, the military arm of the Nazi party, at the age of 18, exercised his right to silence.
The courtroom was stunned to silence as Schwarzbaum delivered his testimony of the time he had spent in Auschwitz, where he lost 35 members of his family.
He said he remained haunted by what he had experienced there. “One memory keeps returning – the image of an SS Sturmbannführer [a Nazi paramilitary rank] driving his motorbike in front of a lorry that was completely packed with naked people, who were crying and flailing their arms. No one could help them anymore. It was just like Dante’s Inferno.”
Describing the SS as “cruel and sadistic”, Schwarzbaum said: “The older I get, the more time I have to think about what happened. I am nearly 95 years old and still I often have nightmares about this.”
Hanning is accused of “promoting, facilitating and accelerating” the murders at Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, were slaughtered during the second world war.
Prosecutor Andreas Brendel, reading from the indictment, said anyone who worked at Auschwitz knew precisely what happened there.
“The cries and shouts of victims being gassed could be heard outside the gas chamber and everyone who heard them knew that the victims were fighting for their lives,” he said.
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“Whole families, the young and old, were taken to Auschwitz and the selection process [where it was decided whether someone went to the gas chambers or to forced labour] was placed entirely in the hands of the SS soldiers and doctors working on the ramps [where the trains arrived],” he said.
Those who were not chosen to be gassed immediately very often died from executions, starvation, disease or exhaustion from overwork, he added.
He said that Hanning was “familiar with all the different killing methods which could only be carried out because victims were guarded by soldiers like himself”.
Anke Grudda, head of the five judge panel, said prosecutors would need to prove Hanning’s personal guilt.
“From our viewpoint, we must not forget that we are talking about the individual guilt of the defendant,” she said. “It is about whether the defendant is personally guilty of what he is accused of. We want to find out whether the defendant was in Auschwitz, in which period, and which activities he carried out.
“I think we are all aware of the historical context of the charges … however, we are aware that we have survivors of the Holocaust, which is of incredible importance … we want to give survivors the opportunity to speak here in front of the public.”
When first questioned by investigators, Hanning admitted that he had served in the so-called Auschwitz I part of the camp, located in the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Oświęcim, but denied having spent any time working at the notorious Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of those who lost their lives were slaughtered.
The trial opened with defence lawyers filing a motion for that statement to be omitted from the testimony. The lawyers argued that Hanning had been taken aback when the investigators had knocked on his door and had not been fully aware that what he said would be used as part of a criminal investigation.
It was unclear whether the defence team wanted to make the point that Hanning did not serve at the camp at all. There was no reaction from the panel of judges as to how they would react to the motion.
The court heard that Hanning had served as a guard in two separate SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) companies in Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944. Their specific role had been to guard prisoners who were being deployed for slave labour outside the camp. The companies were also moved to Birkenau to work on processing more than 430,000 prisoners who arrived from Hungary in the so-called “Hungarian Action” during May and July 1944. Those prisoners were systematically loaded from trains on to a ramp from where they were stripped of their possessions and selected for labour or for the gas chambers. More than 300,000 were gassed on arrival.
Prosecutors argue that Hanning’s very involvement in those companies means he directly contributed to the Nazi killing machine.
Hanning fought in eastern Europe at the start of the war before his transfer to Auschwitz in January 1942.
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The court will hear the testimony of other former prisoners. Thirty-eight joint plaintiffs from Hungary, Israel, Britain, Canada, the US and Germany are also following the trial.
Due to Hanning’s age and frailty, doctors have said the daily court sessions should not be longer than two hours.
Three other trials of people alleged to have served at Auschwitz are due to take place this year.
German judicial authorities are scrambling to bring the last remaining Nazis to trial, after decades in which many were allowed to escape justice. Of 6,500 SS members who are known to have served at Auschwitz, only 29 were ever brought to trial in Germany. In the former communist East Germany, 20 were prosecuted. Most escaped justice because of the belief that prevailed until recently that anyone who had served under the Nazis had been forced to do so by the regime, and was therefore not guilty.
But following the 2011 trial of John Demjanjuk, a car mechanic from Ohio, US, who was convicted for being a guard without any evidence that he had been directly involved in any killings, a new precedent was set. The same argument was used last year to convict Oskar Gröning, another former Auschwitz guard who was nicknamed the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” because of his responsibility for sorting through the money stolen from prisoners on arrival.
On the eve of Hanning’s trial, Auschwitz survivors held a press conference in which they stressed the importance that the trial was taking place.
“This trial should have happened 40, 50 years ago,” said 90-year-old Justin Sonder, a German who survived Auschwitz, as reported by Deutsche Welle.
One of the co-plaintiffs, Erna de Vries, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 aged 23, told Reuters ahead of the trial: “I am not hateful, but it somehow feels like justice to see this man, who was working there [Auschwitz] when my mother died, on trial.”
Outside the court on Thursday morning, spectators tried to shout down an 87-year-old woman who has twice been convicted of Holocaust denial – a criminal offence in Germany. Police had to intervene to protect Ursula Haverbeck, who is popular in far-right circles, and has previously claimed that Auschwitz was not a death camp, only a labour camp.
The trial resumes on Friday with further testimony expected from Schwarzbaum.