Seven decades after Reinhold Hanning served as a guard in the Auschwitz death camp, the 94-year-old did what few before him have done: he apologised.
Hanning has been on trial since February in the western German city of Detmold, charged with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder because his wartime service ensured the smooth functioning of the death factory in Nazi-occupied Poland.
On day 13 of his trial, his defence lawyer read out a 20-page statement explaining how the young soldier came to serve in Auschwitz. Then the wheelchair-bound 94-year-old took a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and spoke.
“I regret deeply being a member of a criminal organisation that was responsible for the deaths of many innocent people, the destruction of countless families, for horror, torture and suffering of victims and their victims,” he said.
“I am ashamed that I allowed injustice to happen and did nothing to stop it. I apologise for my behaviour. I am desperately sorry.”
Hanning joined the Hitler Youth with his classmates in 1935, aged 13. In 1940, aged 18, he volunteered for the Waffen SS at the urging of his stepmother and, after service in France and Serbia, was injured by a grenade in Kiev in 1941.
He was reassigned to Auschwitz, which he thought at first was a camp for French prisoners of war. There his duties at first involved registering troops and prisoner work groups who left the camp each morning.
“But someone, like me, who was there for a long time eventually one learned what was going on,” said Hanning in a longer statement, read out by his defence lawyer.
“People were shot, gassed and burned. I could see how corpses were taken back and forth or moved out. I could smell the burning bodies; I knew corpses were being burned.”
Selection ramps
After the war he never discussed Auschwitz with his wife or family. When the trial began in February he denied knowing what went on in the camp, now he denies only the prosecution claim that he worked on the selection ramps in the Birkenau death camp.
Until a decade ago, state prosecutors argued that they could not prosecute anyone for Holocaust crimes unless they could be linked directly to specific killings. But that logic was overturned by the trial and conviction in 2011 of John Demnjanjuk for serving in Nazi death camps in occupied Ukraine.
Last July a 93-year-old man, Oskar Gröning, was given a four-year sentence for complicity in the murder of 300,000 people in Auschwitz.
Putting ex-Nazi nonagenarians on trial has proven a controversial business in Germany, seven decades after the end of the second World War, but Jewish groups have welcomed this final push.
In the Detmold court on Friday, however, Holocaust survivors were not impressed with the belated admission.
“It may be that he is a different person to then, but what is he apologising for? That he killed 35 members of my family, is there an apology for that?” said Mr Leon Schwarzbaum, a 95 year-old Auschwitz survivor.
