On 24 May 2018 the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) decided to close the appeal proceedings in the Auschwitz Trial against the former SS man Reinhold Hanning as an accessory to murder, due to the death of the convicted person in May 2017. The decision has now been presented in writing.

In a trial in Detmold that received worldwide attention in 2016, Hanning was sentenced to five years in prison as an accessory to murder in at least 170,000 instances. Several Auschwitz survivors had given evidence. Despite decades-long delays on the part of the German judiciary, they felt the trial was a significant effort made by a German court to finally heed and do justice to them and their murdered relatives.

The Federal Court of Justice’s decision to close the case contains the eminently significant and extraordinary statement for the Auschwitz survivors: “The guilty verdict of being an accessory to murder would have been upheld in the appeal procedure”.

This case again underscores the BGH decision in the Auschwitz Trial against Gröning that every SS man serving in Auschwitz and Birkenau was actively involved in the machinery of murder, was jointly responsible and thus complicit to the crimes committed there.

Commenting on this in Berlin, Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee said:

“It has taken 65 years for the German judiciary to acknowledge the memories and descriptions provided by the survivors of Auschwitz concerning the joint responsibility and participation of every single SS perpetrator, and to reach decisions in this sense. Consequently, it is eminently important for the survivors to have received further confirmation from the Federal Court of Justice, that a highly competent and sensitive court in Detmold has pronounced justice in the name of the German people."