Ex-Auschwitz guard, "willing henchman" in Holocaust, convicted in Germany

A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard was sentenced to jail in Germany on Friday by a judge who branded him a "willing and efficient henchman" in the Holocaust. 

In what is likely to be one of Germany's last trials for World War Two-era atrocities, Reinhold Hanning was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people at the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. 

Rejecting the defence argument that the former SS officer had never killed, beaten or abused anyone himself, Judge Anke Grudda said Hanning had chosen to serve in the notorious death camp and had helped it run.

"It is not true that you had no choice; you could have asked to be transferred to the war front," Grudda told Hanning as she read out the verdict.

She said it was impossible that he had been unaware of the murders since he spent two and a half years at the camp and had been promoted twice during that time. 

"That shows that you had proven your value as a willing and efficient henchman in the killings," Grudda said. 

The white-haired Hanning, dressed in a grey suit and tie and seated in a wheel chair, listed to the verdict impassively. His lawyer, Johannes Salmen, said they would appeal. 

"I assume he will not be fit for a custodial sentence. That means he will not have to go to jail," Salmen said.

During the 20-day trial, which dragged on over four months in total, the court heard testimony from around a dozen Holocaust survivors, many extremely elderly, who detailed horrific experiences, recalling piles of bodies and the smell of burnt flesh in Auschwitz.

One of them, Hedy Bohm, 88, whose parents perished in Auschwitz, said: "I am grateful and pleased to be here at this moment, when justice was finally done after 70 years." 

With tears in her eyes, she told reporters after the hearing: "My murdered mother and father can perhaps rest in peace. It's a dream I never dreamed to come true."