Silence in the face of history’s worst evil
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.
