Reinhold Hanning, SS Guard at Auschwitz, Died a Free Man at Ninety-Five

© Reuters


The Rockhouse won't roll any horror pics of Auschwitz since, if you have any kind of heart, you have already seen them or perhaps you saw "Schindler's List" which was, in part, at Auschwitz.


A Nazi SS sergeant convicted of accessory to murder of 170,000 people at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp has died at the age of 95 – without spending a single day behind bars.
Former guard Reinhold Hanning died Thursday, a year after he was convicted for his part in the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of people at the notorious death camp.

Hanning was sentenced to five years in prison, but never served time in prison due to an ongoing appeal against his conviction.

RT:  Nazi accessory to murder of 170,000 Auschwitz prisoners dies a free man


Yah, yah, yah, you're getting frothy but nothing is ever so simple as it seems.


Witness testimonies claimed Hanning watched how prisoners were selected for the gas chambers and was aware of the regular mass executions of inmates, as well as their starvation.

Hanning’s defense demanded his acquittal, saying that at no time did he have people killed, beaten or aided in their deaths, despite being a guard. Hanning apologised to the victims.

- RT

Apologies from a serial killer don't mean anything but he wasn't.  There's the 23-year-old kid swept into the most overtly oppressive regime the modern world has experienced and this is where we get to the Milgram obedience experiments.  (WIKI: Milgram experiment)

Rather than flogging the science, it was a clever way to demonstrate some subset of humans will inflict pain on other humans if we believe the order to do so came from someone with sufficient authority.


The Rockhouse is not building a cop for the man but we do try to understand.  We will accept his contention he did not actually beat or kill anyone but it happened with his tacit approval.  The Milgram Experiments to add a twist to that since the strength of will to protest the foul things he was saying would have been confounded by an apparently inherent drive to obey.

When the authority came only from some med tech in a lab coat, the subject in the experiment was willing to inflict pain and seemingly quite a lot of it on a shill in another room.  Of course it was all fake but the subject did not know that.

Now we see young Reini (?) and the authority comes from one of the most heinously despotic regimes ever so what does that do to his Milgram other than flip it off the charts, we imagine.


Again, I am absolutely not making an excuse for him but we see Auschwitz and go wtf ... wtf ... how could anyone do something so vicious it still brings tears of shame to everyone seventy years later.

I still don't understand and I doubt I ever will but it makes a tiny bit of sense in a system within which protest will only get you killed.