Survivor’s son reacts to a Nazi's sentence

A German court has sentenced 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning, a former Nazi, to five years in prison for being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 Jews between January 1942 and June 1944, when he served as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Hanning served in a unit that handled newly transported prisoners, and assisted in selecting those who would temporarily live as slave laborers and those who would be murdered on the day of their arrival. He was not accused of personally killing a single prisoner, but rather of being an accomplice to many murders and of being a willing cog in the Nazi machinery of annihilation. More than 1 million people were systematically killed at the camp during World War II; Hanning was specifically charged for the slaughter of 170,000 Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz because his service records could be matched with their well-documented transportation logs.

Both of my parents were present at Auschwitz during Hanning’s “service” and were fortunate enough to have survived. Their story is documented in my book, “Kuzmino Cronicles: Memoirs of Teenage Holocaust Survival” (Shoah Forensics Art Institute Publications, 2014). Had they seen Hanning, they certainly would have had no recollection of him. More than 60 of the 170,000 murdered Jews were members of both my parents’ immediate and extended families. Although this number represents a small fraction of the victims, it is a large number for a single family and exemplifies the devastating impact of the Shoah on a small, personalized scale. 

My mother, a co-plaintiff in this case, and my father assisted Thomas Walther, one of the major prosecutors, in making this very precise point by constructing our family tree for presentation at Hanning’s trial. Black boxes were used to represent family members murdered in Auschwitz on the day of arrival, and grey boxes portrayed those murdered at Auschwitz or at other slave labor camps at a later date. Translated into English, Walther’s explanatory caption underneath the family tree diagram states, “I think this [family tree] most clearly demonstrates the destruction.”