A Front-Row Seat to Germany’s Long Reckoning With Its PastBy ALISON SMALEJUNE 17, 2016
DETMOLD, Germany — In many ways, it is fitting that Germany’s last trial of a former SS guard at Auschwitz played out far from the spotlight, in this pretty provincial town of some 70,000 souls.
It was from places like these — a rural corner of North Rhine-Westphalia, modern Germany’s most populous state — that the Nazis formed their bedrock, the millions of men and women who signed up to Hitler’s apparently triumphant cause and with little questioning executed its murderous maxims.
They were people like Reinhold Hanning, 94, who on Friday was sentenced to five years as an accessory to at least 170,000 deaths during his time as an SS guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, from January 1943 to mid-1944.
After World War II, Mr. Hanning was in British custody, and he was released in 1948 to live out his life in his hometown, Lage, six miles from Detmold. He said he never spoke about Auschwitz to anyone, not even to his wife, two sons and grandchildren.
His four-month trial yielded a brief, carefully crafted apology of sorts from him for being a member of “a criminal organization, which is responsible for the death of many innocent people, for the destruction of countless families, for misery, torture and sorrow on the side of the victims and their relatives.”
That apology fell far short of the reckoning sought by 57 co-plaintiffs, Holocaust survivors such as Leon Schwarzbaum, also 94, who on the trial’s opening day in February urged Mr. Hanning to break his silence, since “we will both soon meet our maker.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/world/europe/reinhold-hanning-nazi-auschwitz.html?_r=0
