At the main entrance of the Nazi camp at Auschwitz one could read: "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work makes you free"). The current trial of Reinhold Hanning, 94, a former SS guard at the camp, brings to mind one of the saddest ironies in that most tragic place. He is being tried in the court city of Detmold, in western Germany, for his complicity in the death of 170,000 people, when he was just over 20 years old. Hanning is not charged with having directly participated in the killings in the camp; prosecutors accuse him of facilitating the murders in his capacity as a guard.
Hanning had been urged by his stepmother to join the SS. He was sent to France and then to the eastern front. After he was injured in Kiev, and having been rejected twice in his request to rejoin the front, he was sent as an internal service officer to Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the most infamous death camps constructed by the Nazis.
Concentration camps had existed in Germany since 1933, as detention centers for Jews, political prisoners and others perceived as enemies of the Nazi state. Death camps, however, were built for the sole purpose of killing Jews and others the Nazis deemed as "undesirables." They included artists, educators, homosexuals, communists, Gypsies and the mentally or physically disabled considered unfit for survival in Nazi Germany.