A Canadian Holocaust survivor says the former Nazi guard who apologized Friday couldn’t even look him in the eye when they met in court earlier this year.
Max Eisen was reacting to word that 94-year old Reinhold Hanning apologized to Auschwitz death camp survivors in a German courtroom Friday. Hanning said that although he was aware Jews were being gassed and their corpses burned at the camp, he did nothing to stop it.
The former SS sergeant issued the apology himself, speaking quietly into a microphone from his wheelchair – a fact that surprised the 87-year-old Eisen. He says when he testified at Hanning’s trial in February, the former SS sergeant refused to speak or even to look him in the eye.
“He wasn’t talking, he wasn’t looking around,” Eisen told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview from Toronto.
“I would have hoped he would have been man enough. I mean, you were man enough in your SS uniform and now all of a sudden, you hide your face? It’s a big stretch.”
Asked for his reaction to Hanning’s words, Eisen replied, “Well, he said the right things. At least he apologized.”
Eisen said he would like to read everything the court transcript, to see what Hanning said and how the chief judge replied.
“It’s better than not saying anything,” Eisen said. “It’s a good thing he said that, but there’s no ending to this.”
Hanning’s job at Auschwitz was to register patrols and work details coming and going through the front gate. Later, he was assigned to a guard tower and said he had orders to shoot prisoners trying to escape. He faces 170,000 counts of accessory to murder.
Eisen doesn’t know if he ever met Hanning, but says they may have crossed paths on the platform when Eisen arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May, 1944.
That was the day that Eisen, then 15, was told to go to the left, into the slave labour camp with his father and uncle, while his mother, younger siblings and grandparents were signalled to go right, into the gas chambers.
Eisen was the only one still alive when the camp was liberated a year later.
He remembers that in Auschwitz, guards like Hanning treated prisoners terribly.
“They felt they could grind us away, body and soul. They were walking around like they were gods and we were absolutely nothing,” he said.
“We were not even allowed to look them in their eyes. When SS guards spoke to you, you had to look down, you had to rip your cap off and say, ‘A-9892 reports.’ So here is this man now who is not man enough to look me in the face.”
Some 40 Holocaust survivors are acting as co-plaintiff at Hanning’s trial. Eisen was one of three Canadians who testified in February.
“I left without any emotions. I mean it was sort of like speaking to a wall. But my job was to leave my testimony and that was it. I did what I was asked to do and I felt good about that,” he said.
As for what should happen to Hanning if he’s convicted, Eisen said he would leave that up to the judge.
But he added he would like to see Hanning ordered to speak to high school students, to tell them about where brainwashing and extreme ideology can lead.
“I think this is the only thing we can expect from a man of this age,” Eisen said.
“That would be the best thing. I mean, what would we get out of him sitting in a jail?”
