Auschwitz survivor says accused ‘must have known’ of the mass killings

A Holocaust survivor said four suspects accused by German prosecutors of being accessory to murder at Auschwitz must have known of the mass killings taking place at the camp because of the “unbearable stench” of burning bodies.

Germany is holding what are likely to be its last trials linked to the Holocaust, in which more than six million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis.

Three men and one woman in their 90s are accused of being an accessory to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

“I want to know what their motivation was, why so many joined in killing millions of people,” 95-year-old Leon Schwarzbaum, a state witness at the trial of two of the suspects, told Reuters.

“I just hope they all talk eventually. I want to hear it out of their mouths, what they did and why. I want them to tell the truth,” he said.

Mr Schwarzbaum, who lost all 35 members of his family in the Holocaust, survived by working at a Siemens factory camp near the Auschwitz camp.

After the war he briefly lived in the US but returned to Berlin where he married and opened an antique shop.

Images of the killings and the camp’s horrors haunt him to this day, Mr Schwarzbaum said.

He dismissed claims by some of the accused that they had not been aware of the mass murders taking place.

“They lie. It’s impossible not to have known what happened. You could smell the burning bodies.

"It was an unbearable stench, day and night, and not only there in the camp but across the entire area,” Schwarzbaum said.

The trial of 95-year-old Hubert Zafke, a former Auschwitz paramedic, and of 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning, a former camp guard, have started.

In mid-April, 93-year-old former Auschwitz guard Ernst Tremmel will go on trial. No date has been set for the trial of 92-year-old Helma M., a radio operator at Auschwitz.

She is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 260,000 people.