Ex-SS guard on trial in late push to punish Nazi crimes

Associated Press

DETMOLD, GERMANY

A 94-year-old former SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp is going on trial this week 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 starts today and 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.