Auschwitz Guard Goes On Trial Today – IOTW Report

Auschwitz Guard Goes On Trial Today

Reinhold Hanning claims that he was a 20-year-old SS guard in a part of Auschwitz where they weren’t gassing Jews. The 94-year-old goes on trial in Germany today for being an accessory to 170,000 murders.

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When you read how few Auschwitz guards have actually been convicted it will break your heart.

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14 Comments on Auschwitz Guard Goes On Trial Today

  1. “Reinhold Hanning has said he served at Auschwitz as a 20-year-old member of the German SS guard, but insists he served in a part of the camp where everyone made cookies, s’mores, and had a wonderful time singing songs and having potato sack races.”

  2. Oh, so Hanning wasn’t in the part of Auschwitz where they actually gassed Jews? I suppose he was stationed in the part of Auschwitz where they had room service and occasionally the swimming pool would be closed for maintenance.

    The place was a brutal hellhole, and was built for the express purpose of exterminating people and disposing of the bodies. Germany had numerous consecration camps, but built 7 camps just designed to kill people. Those who were not killed immediately were worked either to death or until no longer useful, and then killed. The planned mortality rate in death camps was to be 100%.

    Finally, Hanning was SS. As a general rule, one had to volunteer for the SS, so any claim that he didn’t know what he was getting into are bogus. I’m not Jewish (in fact, I would qualify for membership in the SS), but regardless of age, these people should continued to be hunted down and tried for their actions.

  3. Prosecuting other than the leaders for losing a war is among the lowest levels of barbarism. That this concept ahs been brought out, and dusted off from the trash heap of history is a shame.
    Is this man more complicit than the operators of the train stations? Or the engineers? or the people that maintained the tracks? Or those who willingly paid taxes to finance this effort? or those who marched in parades of support?
    Were this reversed would Germany be right to go after those involved in the firebombing of Dresden or other campaigns where large numbers of innocents were killed?
    Should Japan go after and punish our people involved in the nuclear program?
    What if the Black lives Matter people win and put the police and prison guards on trial. Can we really expect them to be more civilized than we are?

  4. Yes, what this fellow participated in is more heinous that ordinary. Would I advocate punishing Wermacht soldiers, even officers, for fighting for Germany? No. Would I punish German civil servants for war crimes? No. And in fact several German high officers were let off relatively easily – Doenitz, a committed Nazi who headed the submarine branch and later the entire German navy, and was technically the last leader of Germany in WW II – received a 10 year sentence instead of hanging.

    The SS operated death camps whose sole purpose was to kill citizens, both German and citizens of conquered areas, based only on arbitrary characteristics that may or may not have even been valid at the time they were sent to these places. Many of the people killed for being Jewish were not even practicing Jews; they just had Jewish ancestors. Many of the German Jews were loyal citizens, and some of them were decorated WW I veterans. Russians were killed en masse because they were of Slavic descent and thus subhuman. Gypsies were exterminated. The mentally disabled were exterminated. The vast majority of these people committed no crime, were targeted only because of religion or ancestry, and these atrocities were committed for no war aims whatsover.

    As SS, Hanning would have had to volunteer for this branch of German military service – if he was pressed into service, he may have a defense he can raise. He may not have been involved in gassing people just off the train, but every inmate in Auschwitz was under a death sentence, and the “workers” were systematically killed after their usefulness ended (and sometimes before). One cannot work in a slaughter house and not know what is going on. Hanning knew what was happening, and chose to participate.

    Personally, I believe that targeting civilian areas such as Dresden was also criminal, but at least the Allied leaders had a war related reason – to discourage Germany as a whole from continuing the war. But Nazi death camps served no purpose other than to kill entire segments of the population based upon insane concepts of racial purity.

  5. JohnS is right. But Wyatt brings up valid counterpoints, too. I guess what the question boils down to is, how far do you want to go with the concept of individual guilt for an entire society’s actions? I mean, isn’t almost every German citizen at fault for not rising up and stopping Hitler when they knew he was leading them to war? There were those who believed that after WW2, but you cannot put an entire nation on trial. Likewise, it makes little sense to me to try a 95-year old man for his actions as a 20-year old kid who was probably brainwashed into thinking that it was his patriotic duty and an honor to serve in the SS.

    Here’s another thing to think about, too: To my knowledge, no one has ever suggested that the Jewish “Sonderkommandos” who, in order to stay alive, cooperated with the Nazis in the killing of their own people, be charged with any crime. Yet they were undoubtedly much more involved with the killing process than this guy was.

    I recommend seeing a very good movie called The Book Thief. It offers a sobering insight into what it was like to live as an ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany during WW2.

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