Silence in the face of history’s worst evil

Following a ground-breaking case in Germany last week, in which a former Auschwitz guard apologised for his crimes, Andrew Nagorski looks at the refusal of many former Nazis to say sorry.

Seventy years after the Nuremberg trials, something truly extraordinary happened in a German courtroom last week. Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard, who will go down in history as one of the last of Hitler’s perpetrators to be charged for his role in the Third Reich, offered an apology.

Hanning declared he was “sincerely sorry” and “ashamed” that he had belonged to a criminal organisation that committed mass murder and countless atrocities, and that he had never done anything to prevent such actions.