A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard has gone on trial in Germany on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, accused of serving in the death camp at a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were gassed.
Former SS sergeant Reinhold Hanning maintains that he served in a part of the Auschwitz camp complex where no gassings were taking place.
Prosecutors argue that all guards helped the camp function and that during the so-called "Hungarian action" in 1944 - when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were shipped to the camp - almost all were called upon to help deal with the vast numbers of people arriving at the killing complex in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The trial in Detmold was moved to the city's chamber of industry and commerce to accommodate the large number of observers and reporters. There was also a heavy police presence in the city.
The trial for Hanning, who is from a town near the western city of Detmold, is the latest to follow a precedent set in 2011, when former Ohio car-worker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.
Hanning's lawyer, Johannes Salmen, said that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed.
Prosecutor Andreas Brendel said, however, that guards in the main camp were also used as on-call guards to augment those in Birkenau when trainloads of Jews were brought in.
"We believe that these auxiliaries were used in particular during the so-called Hungarian action in support of Birkenau," he said.
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