DETMOLD, Germany — A 94-year-old former SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp is going on trial this week on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, the first of up to four cases being brought to court this year in an 11th-hour push by German prosecutors to punish Nazi war crimes.
Reinhold Hanning is accused of serving as an SS Unterscharfuehrer — similar to a sergeant — in Auschwitz from January 1943 to June 1944, a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were brought to the camp in cattle cars and were gassed to death.
The trial for the retiree from a town near the western city of Detmold will start Thursday. It is one of the latest that follow a precedent set in 2011, when former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.
The verdict vastly widened the number of possible prosecutions, establishing that simply helping the camp to function was sufficient to make one an accessory to the murders committed there.
Before that, prosecutors needed to present evidence of a specific crime — a difficult task with few surviving witnesses and perpetrators whose names were rarely known and whose faces were often only seen briefly.
Hanning’s attorney, Johannes Salmen, says that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed.
Prosecutor Andreas Brendel said, however, that guards in the main camp were also used as on-call guards to augment those in Birkenau when trainloads of Jews were brought in.
‘‘We believe that these auxiliaries were used in particular during the so-called Hungarian action in support of Birkenau,’’ he said.
Leon Schwarzbaum, a 94-year-old Auschwitz survivor from Berlin who is the first witness scheduled for the trial, said he can’t forget the vivid images he witnessed there.
‘‘The chimneys were spewing fire ... and the smell of burning human flesh was so unbelievable that one could hardly bear it,’’ he told reporters Wednesday.
Though he said he felt deeply unsettled about staring Hanning in the eyes in the courtroom Thursday, he said he thought it was important to be there and that more than punishment, he hoped the trial would give the former SS man an opportunity to give a full accounting of what he saw and did.
In all, about 40 Auschwitz survivors or their relatives have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law, though not all will testify.
Hanning’s case is one of some 30 involving former Auschwitz guards investigated by federal prosecutors from Germany’s special Nazi war crimes office in Ludwigsburg.
Although Demjanjuk always denied serving at the death camp and died before his appeal could be heard, prosecutors last year used the same legal reasoning to convict SS Unterscharfuehrer Oskar Groen-ing, who served in Auschwitz, on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. Groening has appealed the verdict.
Hubert Zafke, 95, a former SS Oberscharfuehrer — roughly equivalent to a sergeant first class — is scheduled to go on trial at the end of February on 3,681 counts of accessory to murder on accusations he served as a medic at an SS hospital in Auschwitz in 1944.
