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Former Auschwitz Guard Found to Be Complicit in 170,000 Murders

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Deacon Greg Kandra - published on 06/18/16

From NPR:

A German court sentenced 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning to five years in prison for being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people between January 1942 and June 1944, when he served as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. More than 1 million people were systematically murdered at the camp during World War II. Almost all of them were Jewish. Hanning, who served in a unit that handled newly arrived prisoners and assisted in determining who would be enslaved and who would be sent to die, was charged in connection with the slaughter of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz. The number of murders in which Hanning was found to be complicit, 170,000, was determined by matching Hanning’s service records with transportation logs for Hungarian Jews. Many survivors took the witness stand to testify about what they experienced at the camp. “It was just like Dante’s Inferno,” Leon Schwarzbaum told a packed courtroom in Detmold, Germany, according to The Guardian. His time as a prisoner at the camp overlapped with the time Hanning was a guard there. “The older I get, the more time I have to think about what happened,” Schwarzbaum said. “I am nearly 95 years old and still I often have nightmares about this.”

Read on. 

Photo: Getty Images

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