Who Is Reinhold Hanning? Auschwitz Guard Who Was Accessory To 170,000 Murders At Concentration Camp Dies

Reinhold Hanning, an Auschwitz guard convicted of 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, died Tuesday – without having served a single day in prison. Hanning, who died at the age of 95, was convicted of five years in prison last year but was still in the process of appealing the verdict when he died.

Hanning worked as a guard at the concentration camp from January 1942 to June 1944. And while the court found no evidence that he was a direct participant in the deaths that occurred at Auschwitz, he was convicted for his role there. Prosecutors in the case said he met prisoners as they arrived at the concentration camp and might have escorted some to their deaths at gas chambers.

Thanks to new legal rules in Germany, Hanning was able to be held accountable as an accessory to murder although he was not found to be directly responsible for deaths. During his four-month trial, in which elderly survivors of Auschwitz testified against him, Hanning apologized for his role.

“I am ashamed that I saw injustice and never did anything about it and I apologize for my actions,” he told the court. “I am very, very sorry.”

Hanning first joined the Hitler Youth alongside his class at the age of 13 before joining the Waffen SS when he turned 18. He was part of a number of battles in World War II before being injured and removed from the front lines of battle, at which point he was transferred to duty at Auschwitz. Hanning was first assigned to register patrols and work details before being moved to a guard tower.

“People were shot, gassed and burned,” he said during the trial. “I could see how corpses were taken back and forth or moved out. I could smell the burning bodies. I knew corpses were being burned.”

More than one million people were killed at Auschwitz before the camp was liberated in January 1945. Hanning said he had tried his “whole life to forget” about his time at the concentration camp, calling it a “nightmare.”

“I want to say that it disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organization,” he told the court.

Hanning and a few other now-elderly people who worked at Auschwitz were among the last Nazis who would face trial for their actions. Those people included 94-year-old Oskar Groening, otherwise known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” who was sentenced in 2015 to four years in prison after he was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 people at the camp.

A group of Holocaust survivors and victims’ families issued a statement after Groening’s conviction.

“It gives us satisfaction,” the said. “That now the perpetrators cannot evade prosecution as long as they live.”