A woman born inside the Auschwitz concentration camp has accused a former guard on trial for being an accessory to the murders of 170,000 Holocaust victims of “making hell possible”.
Addressing Reinhold Hanning at the court in Detmold on Friday, 71-year-old Angela Orosz Richt-Bein said: “People like you, Mr Hanning, made the hell of Auschwitz possible. People who looked on and assisted without asking questions.”
The Hungarian-born Richt-Bein’s mother was three months pregnant when she was deported to Auschwitz from Hungary, giving birth to her daughter in the camp in Nazi-annexed Poland shortly before Christmas 1944.
At the trial, Richt-Bein told how the notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele had experimented with sterilisation drugs on her mother, injecting an acidic substance straight into her uterus. Her birth had gone unnoticed, she said, because she had only weighed 1kg (2.2lbs) when she was born, and had been too weak to scream.
Even though the concentration camp was liberated five weeks after her birth, doctors in Hungary had given her a minimal chance of survival: “I only weighed three kilograms after a year, as much as other children weighed straight after being born,” said Richt-Bein, who now lives in Montreal, Canada.
Facing her former guard in the courtroom, the Holocaust survivor said: “You know what happened to all the people, you enabled their murder. Tell us! Tell us!”
The defendant, who sat in a wheelchair, declined to respond to Richt-Bein’s appeal. His lawyer said there would be statement on behalf of her client before Easter.
Hanning is a retired dairy farmer who had volunteered for the Waffen SS, the military arm of the Nazi party, at the age of 18. The 94-year-old has previously admitted that he had served in the Auschwitz I part of the camp, located in the Polish town of Oświęcim, but denied having spent any time working at the more notorious Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of those who lost their lives were slaughtered.
When the trial began earlier this month, Anke Grudda, head of the five-judge panel, said prosecutors would need to prove Hanning’s personal guilt.
“From our viewpoint, we must not forget that we are talking about the individual guilt of the defendant,” she said. “It is about whether the defendant is personally guilty of what he is accused of. We want to find out whether the defendant was in Auschwitz, in which period, and which activities he carried out.”
Friday also saw 87-year-old concentration camp survivor Ben Lesser give a witness statement. Appealing to members of the public at the trial, the survivor said: “You are one of the last people who can still hear the witnesses,” and asked them to use their experience to prevent another holocaust.
Lesser, who now lives in Los Angeles, described how the camp guards made prisoners slap their legs in a steady rhythm, threatening to shoot anyone who could not keep in time. “The guards had a lot of fun watching us suffer.”
More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, were murdered in the Auschwitz camps during the second world war.
• This article was amended on 29 february 2016. An earlier version said “more than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, were slaughtered during the second world war”. This has been corrected.
