Café Mente (A coffee..?): Will Hanning Case Be Germany’s last?

Friday, June 17, 2016

Will Hanning Case Be Germany’s last?

To sit in the hushed makeshift courtroom where Reinhold Hanning is on trial is to watch Germany confront its past, face to face.
On Friday the court is expected to deliver its verdict on the former Auschwitz SS guard accused of complicity in the murder of at least 170,000 people.
It's hard to imagine this frail 94-year-old man proudly dressed in his Nazi uniform, guarding terrified prisoners in a death camp.
But as, one by one, the elderly survivors of Auschwitz stand up and address him directly, that changes. Their voices are steady, their stories terrible. And the sights and sounds they describe resonate long after they've finished speaking.
And that's exactly what this trial is for.

Reinhold Hanning as an SS soldier and now

Reinhold Hanning denies complicity in more than 170,000 murders at Auschwitz
Prosecutors argue he contributed to the "aim of extermination"
Reinhold Hanning apologised, but survivor Leon Schwarzbaum said: "I lost 35 family members, how can you apologise for that?''
More than 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, most of them Jews

Oskar Groening in court and in SS uniform

Last year, another former Auschwitz guard, Oskar Groening, was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews


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