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, Hanning was in British custody, and he was released in 1948 to live out his life in his hometown, Lage, 6 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 Hanning to break his silence, since “we will both soon meet our maker.’’
“His statement does not go far enough for me,’’ Schwarzbaum said as the trial neared its end. “He should have talked more about what he did, what he took part in, saw. I learned nothing.’’
On that same day, I sat with Thomas Walther, the German lawyer most responsible for the recent handful of prosecutions — seven decades too late — of SS guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp where more than 1 million people were killed — gassed, shot, hanged, injected.
After he retired as a judge, Walther went to work at Germany’s office for Nazi crimes in Ludwigsburg. For decades, German jurists had argued that prosecution of death camp guards was possible only if they could be tied to specific crimes. That was a corollary to the dilatory pursuit of war crimes prosecutions by a West German justice system that was riddled with lawyers and judges who were former Nazis.
Of approximately 6,500 SS guards who had worked at Auschwitz, only 29 people were tried in West Germany. (Twenty more were tried in the communist East.)
Working with Eli Rosenbaum, an American investigator at the US Justice Department, Walther reinterpreted German law to allow for the prosecution of John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian-born American who was eventually extradited to Germany and sentenced in 2011 to five years in jail as an accessory to approximately 28,000 murders in the Sobibor death camp. He died the next year.
The Ludwigsburg office pursued other former guards, resulting in the trial and sentencing last year of Oskar Groening, 95, and now of Hanning. Another two people have been charged, but ill health has made completion of their trials unlikely. Another former Auschwitz guard died in April, just before his trial was to start in Hanau, near Frankfurt.
“Whether in 30 or 40 years these few trials will appear in political and juridical history as a footnote, or a real chapter, only the future will show,’’ Walther said.
The trial last year of Groening, in another pretty, provincial town, Lueneburg, might have seemed unspectacular. Yet it was a reminder of how 20th-century history marched through the lives of perpetrators and victims — and that we all always have choices, and make them.
Hanning’s choice was the SS. He was wounded in fighting around Kiev, wound up in convalescence at a facility used by Auschwitz guards — and then joined them, under circumstances not clarified by the trial.
Leonie Figge, 16, and Stina Ulbrich, 17, among 25 teenagers who had visited Israel in March, came to Hanning’s trial a few times.
“I am so glad to have had the opportunity to be here,’’ Ulbrich said. “It simply moves you.’’
They were avid to learn from Leon Schwarzbaum, who like other Holocaust survivors and co-plaintiffs regularly visits schools to pass on his experiences of the war. Ulbrich imagined in turn passing his words to her own children someday.
Perhaps that will be this trial’s most lasting achievement.
In the meantime, Walther and I sat in Detmold’s pristine old town, which has fine timberwork buildings. When the Nazis held sway in places like these, he reflected, “there were so many swastikas hanging that they covered all the beams.’’
