Auschwitz Survivor Tells Of Death Selections

Holocaust survivors have spoken of their ordeals at the Auschwitz death camp during the trial of a former SS sergeant facing 170,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Reinhold Hanning, 94, sat a few yards from the witnesses, but showed no emotion as they told their stories on day two of the case.

They described crematoria chimneys belching flames, naked prisoners being taken to the gas chambers, and seeing people being shot.

Prosecutors in Detmold, Germany, say Hanning told them that he was a guard at Auschwitz but denied involvement in executions.

Justin Sonder, who at 90 was the youngest of the witnesses, arrived at Auschwitz when he was 17.

He was selected to be a slave labourer for the IG Farben company, rather than sent directly to the gas chambers.

He told the court that after three or four months, he was considered one of the "older" prisoners.

He feared selection days, when SS men would look at rows of naked inmates for hours deciding who was still fit to work and who should be killed.

"I don't have the words to describe how it was, when you know that you could be dead in one or two hours, it made you sick, made you crazy," he said, his voice trembling with emotion.

"I survived 17 selections," added Mr Sonder, a retired police officer from Chemnitz, who lost 22 family members in the Holocaust.

Hanning is accused of serving as an SS Unterscharfuehrer (junior squad leader) in Auschwitz from January 1943 to June 1944 - a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were brought to the camp in cattle cars and gassed to death.

Leon Schwarzbaum, a 94-year-old Auschwitz survivor from Berlin, was used as a slave labourer to help build a factory for Siemens outside the camp.

He said he could not see the gas chambers and crematoria from where he was kept, but that everyone knew what was going on there.

"We saw the fire from the chimneys," he told the court.

"So much fire came out of the chimneys, no smoke, just fire. And that was burning people."

About 40 survivors and their families have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law.

Hanning, a retired dairy operator, has admitted he had served in the Auschwitz I part of the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

He denies serving at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed.

Prosecutors argue that he is guilty of accessory to murder because he helped the death camp function.

There was no evidence of him committing a crime, the court was told.

His lawyer, Andreas Scharmer, said it was "highly likely" his client would make a statement during the proceedings.