A 94-year-old ex-SS man went on trial in western Germany on Thursday, accused of being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people in the Auschwitz death camp.
The opening of the trial against Reinhold Hanning in Detmold began with scuffles outside the courtroom between passersby and Germany's oldest Holocaust denier, the 87-year-old Ursula Havebeck.
Police escorted away Mrs Havebeck, dubbed the “Nazi Granny” for describing as a “belief” the Nazi annihilation of Europe’s Jews, as proceedings began against Mr Hanning. As he is a widower with poor health, the court said it will limit its sittings to two hours daily.
In a 60-page indictment state prosecutors say Mr Hanning served as a guard in the original Auschwitz camp, including on the notorious selections ramps where prisoners spilled out from trains, and is thus indirectly responsible for the murder of at least 170,000 people in the time between January 1943 and 1944.
Mr Hanning agrees he served in the camp, but says his duties were in another part of the complex and he was not involved in any killings.
Though he declined to address the court on Thursday, his defence said he may do so at a later date. They have also asked for the court to dismiss testimony made last autumn during police questioning, because the defendant had just returned from a four-hour medical procedure.
The case is the latest in a series of prosecutions of elderly ex-Nazis in Germany, following a change of thinking in Germany’s legal system.
Until a decade ago, state prosecutors decided, on the basis of case law, that they could not prosecute anyone for Holocaust crimes unless they could be linked directly to specific killings. Without that link, they decreed, there was no case.
But a series of recent cases have overturned that previous logic, in particular the case of John Demjanjuk. He was convicted in 2011 of serving in Nazi death camps in Ukraine but died before final sentencing.
Last July, a court handed down a four-year sentence to the then 93-year-old Oskar Gröning, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, for complicity in the murder of 300,000 people in Auschwitz. Another Nazi trial is looming later this month in the northern German city of Neubrandenburg.
Putting ex-Nazi nonagenarians on trial has proven a controversial business in Germany, seven decades after the end of the Third Reich. But the Simon Wiesenthal Centre has welcomed this late push by German prosecutors, and has launched its own "Operation Last Chance" campaign, encouraging people to come forward with information.
Some 48 Holocaust survivors from Hungary, the United States, Canada and Israel have joined the Detmold case as joint-plaintiff. One of those in court on Thursday was 94-year-old Leon Schwarzbaum, born in Hamburg but deported aged 22 to Auschwitz where his parents and uncle perished.
He appealed to Mr Hanning: “As we’ll soon stand before the highest judge, I ask you to tell what you did and experienced [in Auschwitz].”
