Leon Schwarzbaum, former prisoner No. 132624 Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, Buchenwald, Haselhorst, Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

Dear Mr Hanning,

You will not be judged by temporal justice but by divine justice for the barbaric crimes that the SS carried out against humanity. This will mark the end of your matey gatherings with your former comrades. It is before God you will have to tell the truth that you have withheld to us here at this trial in Detmold.

When confronted with the many million acts of cruelty and murder, you have presented us with the implausible image of a relatively uninvolved spectator.
Instead of depicting the historical truth for humanity and the generations to come, you are hiding yourself behind excuses, silence and legal paragraphs.

During the trial you sat and remained silent. Although you distanced yourself from the SS in your statement, for me your overall behaviour makes your statement unbelievable. To me, your statement is nothing more than paying empty lip service in order to achieve mitigating circumstances from the court.

You have wasted your opportunity to find peace with yourself. Now you will have to live within the darkness of your conscience for the rest of your days.

The SS set up many concentration camps in Europe and initiated a machinery of murder unprecedented in history. This machinery ran like an industrial conveyor belt, and you were a part of this murderous division of labour.
For this, I curse the SS, of which you were a part.

Entire peoples were to be wiped out – did you feel no compassion when you saw young children with their mothers being selected? After all, you knew that the people in Auschwitz were being murdered, you have admitted that.

Were you not compelled to think about the children of Auschwitz as you watched your own children and grandchildren growing up? At the beginning of the trial here in Detmold I even still felt some compassion for you. I sincerely believed that you had become another person. I cannot believe this anymore, because of the way you have hidden yourself away in this trial and tormented us again with your silence.

There is no pardon or forgiveness. Only the dead could grant this, those people whose lives you took as a part of the SS. And the dead do not forgive.  You will have to live with the curse of the unspoken for the rest of your life. In this respect I feel sorry for you.

It was up to you to speak the historical truth, just as we Auschwitz survivors have done here in Detmold. You did not do this, even though the court treated you with such great care and sensitivity.

Just as we, as survivors, will have to live with the terrible memories until we die, you too will be alone with yourself until you die.

Leon Schwarzbaum