Former Auschwitz guard, 94, goes on trial in Germany

A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard has gone on trial in Germany on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder.

The former SS sergeant is accused of serving in the death camp at a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were gassed.

Reinhold Hanning maintains the claim that he served in a part of the Auschwitz camp in a complex where no gassings were taking place.

Prosecutors argue that all guards helped the camp function and that during the so-called "Hungarian action" in 1944 - when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were shipped to the camp - almost all were called upon to help deal with the vast numbers of people arriving.

The trial in Detmold was moved to the city's chamber of industry and commerce to accommodate the large number of observers and reporters. There was also a heavy police presence in the city.

The trial for Hanning, who is from a town near the western city of Detmold, is the latest to follow a precedent set in 2011, when former Ohio car-worker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.

Hanning's lawyer, Johannes Salmen, said that his client acknowledges serving at the Auschwitz I part of the camp complex in Nazi-occupied Poland, but denies serving at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of the 1.1 million victims were killed.

Prosecutor Andreas Brendel said that guards in the main camp were also used as on-call guards to augment those in Birkenau when trainloads of Jews were brought in.

"We believe that these auxiliaries were used in particular during the so-called Hungarian action in support of Birkenau," he said.