Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/639204
ByDavidRising TheAssociatedPress DETMOLD, GERMANY A 94-year-old former SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp is going on trial this week on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, the first of up to four cases be- ing brought to court this year in an 11th-hour push by German prosecutors to punish Nazi war crimes. Reinhold Hanning is ac- cused of serving as an SS Unterscharfuehrer — simi- lar to a sergeant — in Aus- chwitz from January 1943 to June 1944, a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were brought to the camp in cat- tle cars and were gassed to death. The trial for the retiree from a town near the west- ern city of Detmold starts on Thursday and is one of the latest that follow a prec- edent set in 2011, when for- mer Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing. The verdict vastly wid- ened the number of possi- ble prosecutions, establish- ing that simply helping the camp to function was suf- ficient to make one an ac- cessory to the murders com- mitted there. Before that, prosecutors needed to pres- ent evidence of a specific crime — a difficult task with few surviving witnesses and perpetrators whose names were rarely known and whose faces were of- ten only seen briefly. Hanning's attorney, Jo- hannes Salmen, says that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at the Aus- chwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 mil- lion victims were killed. Prosecutor Andreas Brendel told The Associated Press, however, that guards in the main camp were also used as on-call guards to augment those in Birkenau when trainloads of Jews were brought in. "We believe that these auxiliaries were used in particular during the so- called Hungarian action in support of Birkenau," he said. Leon Schwarzbaum, a 94-year-old Auschwitz sur- vivor from Berlin who is the first witness scheduled for the trial, said he can't for- get the vivid images he wit- nessed there. "The chimneys were spewing fire ... and the smell of burning human flesh was so unbeliev- able that one could hardly bear it," he told reporters Wednesday. Though he said he felt deeply unsettled about star- ing Hanning in the eyes in the courtroom Thursday, he said he thought it was im- portant to be there and that more than punishment, he hoped the trial would give the former SS man an op- portunity to give a full ac- counting of what he saw and did. "It's perhaps the last time for him to tell the truth. He has to speak the truth," Schwarzbaum said. In all, about 40 Aus- chwitz survivors or their relatives have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as al- lowed under German law, though not all will testify. Hanning's case is one of some 30 involving former Auschwitz guards investi- gated by federal prosecu- tors from Germany's spe- cial Nazi war crimes office in Ludwigsburg. It was sent to state prosecutors in 2013 with the recommendation that they pursue charges after the office undertook a major review of its files fol- lowing the Demjanjuk ver- dict. Although Demjanjuk al- ways denied serving at the death camp and died before his appeal could be heard, prosecutors last year man- aged to use the same legal reasoning to successfully convict SS Unterscharf- uehrer Oskar Groening, who served in Auschwitz, on 300,000 counts of ac- cessory to murder. Groening's appeal is ex- pected to be heard some- time this year, but prosecu- tors are not waiting to move ahead with other cases. Hubert Zafke, 95, a for- mer SS Oberscharfuehrer — roughly equivalent to a Sgt. 1st Class — is scheduled to go on trial at the end of February in Neubranden- burg, north of Berlin, on 3,681 counts of accessory to murder on accusations he served as a medic at an SS hospital in Auschwitz in 1944. His attorney, Peter-Mi- chael Diestel, says it is Ger- many's "shame" that many higher-ranking Auschwitz perpetrators and other Nazi war criminals were able to escape with minimal or no sentences in the initial years after the war, and questions whether prose- cutors are trying "to make up for mistakes of the past" with his client. "He was a medic for Wehrmacht (army) sol- diers and SS men — for uniformed men — and had no part of the Holocaust, but the judicial argument of the Demjanjuk verdict says that if he didn't pro- vide his service as a medic then Auschwitz wouldn't have functioned," Diestel said. "What should a young man, even if he knew what was going on in Auschwitz, do to stop it?" There is no question there were "some serious failures by the German ju- dicial system in the past," says Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But "that doesn't in any way change the validity of what's happening now." "In a certain sense, you could say these people had the bad luck to live a long life," he told the AP in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. "If they had died five years ago they would never have been go- ing to trial." Two others whose cases are likely to go to trial this year are a 93-year- old woman charged with 260,000 counts of acces- sory to murder on allega- tions she served as a radio operator for Auschwitz's commandant in 1944, and a 94-year-old man charged with 1,276 counts on allega- tions he served as an Aus- chwitz guard. In all four cases, the health of the elderly defen- dants will be a major factor in whether the trials can be concluded. AUSCHWITZ THEARCHIVEOFTHESTATEMUSEUMAUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU SS Oberscharfuehrer Hubert Zafke. Zafke, now 95, is scheduled to go on trial at the end of February 2016in Neubrandenburg, north of Berlin, on 3,681counts of accessory to murder on accusations he served as a medic at an SS hospital in Auschwitz in 1944. Ex-SS guard on trial in late push to punish Nazi crimes BERND THISSEN — DPA Auschwitz concentration camp survivor Leon Schwarzbaum presents an old photograph showing himself, le , next to his uncle and parents who all died in Auschwitz during a press conference in Detmold, Germany. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Just a er the liberation by the Soviet army in January, 1945, a group of children stand wearing concentration camp uniforms including Martha Weiss who was ten years- old, 6th from right, at the time behind barbed wire fencing in the Oswiecim (Auschwitz) Nazi concentration camp. "I t' s p er ha ps t he la st t im e f o r h im to t el l t he t ru th . He h as t o s pe ak th e t ru th ." — L eo n S chwa rzbau m, a 9 4- ye ar -o ld A us chw it z su rv ivo r By Sue Manning The Associated Press Cartoonist Matthew Inman would like to see every housecat wearing an orange collar with its name and number on it. Then if the cat gets loose or lost, by escape or mis- take, the collar will signal, "Help me!" Inman calls the collar campaign the Kitty Con- vict Project, and its aim is to up the percentage of cats that can be reunited with owners. While loose dogs are of- ten picked up on the as- sumption that they're lost, loose cats are usually ig- nored on the assumption that they're either allowed outside by their owners or that they are feral. "We want to change what people see when they see a cat," said Inman, Se- attle-based author of The Oatmeal blog. This isn't Inman's first venture into the feline world. Inman was part of a trio that created the popular Exploding Kit- tens card game, now an app. "It was a horrible name for a game," said Inman, adding that the Kitty Con- vict orange collar project is cat atonement (he calls it catonement). Fifteen percent of pet- owners have lost a dog or cat, according to the ASP- CA's most recent study on the topic. Of those lost pets, 85 percent are re- covered — 93 percent of dogs but just 74 percent of cats, according to Dr. Em- ily Weiss, vice president of ASPCA shelter research and development. "People look for their cats differently than their dogs," Weiss said. "Overall use of collar IDs is lower for cats than dogs. And the likelihood of you being re- united is lower if it's a cat. People wait longer to look and about 25 percent don't come home." Weiss said she was as- tonished by the findings of a 2011 study about col- lars and identification tags. Over 80 percent of pet owners said it was ex- tremely important for pets to have them, but only 30 percent of those same own- ers said their pets wore them. Matt Hucke lives in a small apartment in Seattle and has put the Kitty Con- vict orange collars on his cats, Harold, 6, and Har- old's mom Maude, 9. "Because they have al- ways been indoors, they don't really know what to do when they are outside," he said. The collars, he says, provide "assurance they will be safe" in case they ever do get out. Inman said thousands of the orange collars have been sold. They're avail- able on Amazon.com for $14, a price subsidized by the $9 million raised on Kickstarter for Explod- ing Kittens, said Inman, who created the game with Elan Lee and Shane Small. The collars are cus- tom-stitched with the cat's name and a contact phone number. But no matter what color a collar is, if you see a cat outside, said Weiss, "see if you can him get home." ANIMALS Orange pet collar project aims to get lost cats home Findusonline! VOTING IS UNDERWAY! Vote for your favorite Tehama County Businesses before Wednesday, February 24. OnlineBallotsOnlyat www.redbluffdailynews.com Five Lucky Voters will be selected at random from all eligible ballots on March 4. Each will receive a $100 Shopping Spree at the Tehama County business of their choice! Mustvotefor10categoriestoqualify. | NEWS | REDBLUFFDAILYNEWS.COM THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2016 4 B