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Nazi Auschwitz Guard Appeals Convictions
A former guard at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp is to appeal against his conviction on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder.
Reinhold Hanning’s legal team filed the appeals against the June 17 verdict, according to the Detmold state court.
The 94-year-old was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of helping the camp function in his capacity as a guard from 1942 to 1944.
He will remain free until the appeals process is complete.
During the trial the former SS guard said he was “ashamed” to have been a part of it:
"I want to say that it disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organisation. I am ashamed that I saw injustice and never did anything about it and I apologise for my actions. I am very, very sorry."
Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered during his time there.
Until five years ago, evidence that defendants were directly involved in the killings at the death camps was required in order to convict them.
However, in 2011 a judge concluded that the activities of a camp worker, John Demjanjuk, in Nazi-occupied Poland amounted to complicity in mass murder.
In 2015, 94-year-old Oskar Groening was sentenced to four years in jail for his part in the murders of at least 300,000 people.
The Nazis killed about 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, at Auschwitz in occupied Poland.
Cover Image: The main gate at the former German Nazi death camp of Auschwitz II. Picture: Michel Zacharz
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