Former Auschwitz guard, accessory to 170,000 murders, sentenced to five years in prison
A former guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of accessory to the murder of 170,000 people, The Telegraph reports. Reinhold Hanning, 94, was convicted on Friday in what the judge called possibly one of Germany's final Holocaust trials.
Hanning was an SS sergeant who met Jewish prisoners as they arrived at the camp in rail cars. While Hanning admitted during the trial that he worked at Auschwitz between 1943 and 1944, he maintained that he was only a guard and did not harm anyone and did not know about the gas chambers. Others insist that he couldn't have been ignorant of the operations at the camp due to the length of time he worked at Auschwitz. Elderly Holocaust survivors testified against him in court.
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