Auschwitz survivors, and witnesses against former SS-member Reinhold H., gave a press conference ahead of a new trial of the former death camp guard. They insisted that this trial represents an important new legal step.
Auschwitz survivor Justin Sonder speaks in Detmold on WednesdayImage: picture-alliance/dpa/B.Thissen
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Auschwitz survivors and their lawyers held a press conference in the western German town of Detmold on Wednesday, on the eve of the next trial of a former guard at the notorious Nazi death camp. The 94-year-old, named in the German media only as Reinhold H., was ruled fit to stand trial in a new medical assessment ordered last week by the state court.
"This trial should have happened 40, 50 years ago," said 90-year-old Justin Sonder, a German who survived Auschwitz in his youth. "But now it is not too late to show what once happened."
The guard has been charged with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder for being stationed at the death camp from January 1943 to June 1944. He is alleged to have been a member of the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf (sometimes called the "Death's Head Division" because of its skull-and-crossbone insignia), which was in charge of administering concentration camps.
Oskar Gröning was sentenced to four years in prison last JulyImage: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Heimken
"A state prosecutor has for the first time explained in the indictment that the entire system in Auschwitz was a murder system," Heubner told DW. "That murder not only took place through gas, but through starvation, through forced labor, through living conditions. And that is new, that it has been explained so clearly."
Nor does Heubner believe that this trial will be the last of its kind. "I think the courts will continue to investigate as long as SS men are still alive - that is their legal duty," he said.
The 'Hungary Operation'
The prosecution argues that, as an Unterscharführer (junior squad leader), Reinhold H. would have been responsible for guarding transports of people entering the camp.
The art of the Holocaust
Artists held in Nazi camps depicted the horror they experienced. Now their work is on show in Berlin. The exhibition of 100 works from Israel's Yad Vashem presents the art that survived, though many artists didn't.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
The colors of the ghetto
Can something horrible also be beautiful? As seen in the Berlin exhibition "Art from the Holocaust: 100 Works from the Yad Vashem Collection," a number of artists managed to document life in Nazi concentration camps and ghettos and create great art even during one of humanity's greatest tragedies. Pictured: "A Street in Łódź Ghetto" by Josef Kowner, who survived the Holocaust.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
The refugee
For the first time, 100 works from the Yad Vashem memorial center in Israel are on display at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Of the 50 artists included, 24 were murdered by the Nazis. Among the victims is prominent artist Felix Nussbaum, who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. His famous painting, "The Refugee," was painted in 1939 in Brussels and reveals the desperation of exile.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
A self-portrait of suffering
Works by Charlotte Salomon have been shown elsewhere in Germany as well. In a collection of over 700 individual works, titled "Life? or Theater?: A Song-play," Salomon explored her own tragic life story as a Jew in Berlin. In 1943, she was deported from southern France, where she had found exile, to Auschwitz, where she was murdered immediately upon arrival. She was pregnant at the time.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
Pictures from a hidden girl
Nelly Toll's story is less well known. She and her mother survived the Holocaust in what was then the Polish city of Lwów because they were hidden by Christian friends. Locked in her room, Toll drew artworks including this gouache, "Girls in the Field." Now 81, the artist has traveled from her home in the United States to attend the opening of the Berlin exhibition.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
'Path Between the Barracks'
Leo Breuer from Bonn fought for the German Kaiser in World War I. In 1934, one year after Hitler rose to power, he immigrated to The Hague and then to Brussels, where he was able to work as a painter and exhibit his work. In 1940, he was taken to the St. Cyprien internment camp in France, and then to the camp in Gurs, where he documented his time there in water colors. Breuer died in 1975 in Bonn.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
Artistic collaboration
In Gurs, Leo Breuer created stage designs for the camp cabaret together with photographer and artist Karl Robert Bodek. The two also worked together on greeting cards and other pieces of art - until 1941. That's when Bodek was deported to the camp in Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence and then to Drancy and finally to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in 1942.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
Secret life of the artist
Bedřich Fritta headed the office at the Theresienstadt concentration camp where official propaganda material was produced. But Fritta and his colleagues also secretly drew images of the horrors of the Nazi ghettos. In 1944, their subversion was discovered. Fritta died in Auschwitz. After Theresienstadt was liberated, 200 of his works were found hidden in the walls and buried in the ground.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
Friendship beyond death
Leo Haas helped Fritta create countless works depicting life in the concentration camp. In Sachsenhausen, he was ordered to create counterfeit bills in the currencies of the Allies ("Operation Bernhard"). He survived and later adopted Tomáš, Fritta's son. After the war, Haas found 400 of his hidden works in Theresienstadt.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
Doctor under cover
Pavel Fantl belonged to the artists' circle at Theresienstadt as well. As a medical doctor he also ran the typhus clinic in the camp. Like Fritta, his cover was also blown and he was tortured and sent to Auschwitz. In January 1945, he was shot and killed during a death march. Around 80 of his drawings were smuggled out of Theresienstadt.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
The art teacher
Jacob Lipschitz taught at the art institute in Vilnius before the war. In 1941, he was forced to move to the ghetto in Kaunus, where he joined a group of artists that secretly documented life there. Lipschitz died in March 1945 in the Kaufering concentration camp. After the war, his wife and daughter went back to the Kaunus ghetto and recovered the pictures he had hidden in a cemetery.
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
Preserving dignity in tragedy
The images in the exhibition, which runs through April 3 in Berlin's German Historical Museum, document the inconsolability and brutality of life in Nazi camps. But they also show how artists managed to create a world apart from the horrific deeds of their captors. Pictured is Moritz Müller's "Roofs in Winter."
Image: Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
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But a key part of the case against him is that he was at the death camp for what became known as the "Hungary Operation," the three-month period from May to July 1944 when over 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz and over 300,000 were gassed on arrival.
Even by the standards of the Holocaust, it was an unprecedented acceleration in the rate of deaths. The operation was the first time the camp began working round the clock, and arguably the moment that Auschwitz acquired its iconic notoriety among all of the Third Reich's concentration camps.
Concentrating on the Hungary Operation has become a prosecution tactic in the recent round of Holocaust trials. Gröning was also convicted - on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder - exclusively for his participation in the operation, even though he spent over two years stationed at Auschwitz.
This is partly down to the fact that it is easier, both logistically and legally, for the prosecution to isolate the Hungary Operation as a single crime - distinct from the enormity of the Holocaust, but still part of it and representing both the size of the crime and its impersonal, "industrialized" nature.
Legal turning point
Reinhold H.'s attorney, Johannes Salmen, told the AP news agency that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at Auschwitz II, the Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed.
Around 300,000 people were murdered as part of the 'Hungary Operation'Image: picture-alliance/dpa/F. Leonhardt
Prosecutor Andreas Brendel countered that this would not have exempted him from duty, especially during the acceleration. "We believe that these auxiliaries were used in particular during the so-called Hungarian action in support of Birkenau," Brendel said.
The question that always plagues late Holocaust trials remains: why now, so late? How does punishing a man of over 90, whose role in the Holocaust was relatively minor, serve justice? The answer is that many believe the German justice system has failed to punish active participants in the Nazi genocide. The historian Andreas Eichmüller once counted only 49 convictions from the 6,500 SS officers who were stationed at Auschwitz and survived the war.
In part, this was largely down to the legal problem suggested above: under German law, participation in the Holocaust was not a crime, and defendants could only be convicted for a specific provable act of murder or torture. But the way the mass executions were carried out virtually absolved everyone involved of a specific prosecutable act - at least according to the interpretation of most post-war German state prosecutors. It was only with the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk - a former guard at the Sobibor death camp - that this interpretation changed.
Heubner also insisted on the continued importance of Auschwitz trials - even in the face of arguments that Germany has raked over its Nazi history often enough. "The legal reappraisal of the history has not yet been finished - a social reappraisal is something very different," he said. "This is also a description of a historical situation that shows how quickly a society can slip into the loss of freedom, the loss of human rights, and that's why it's very, very topical and politically charged."
