(Corrects age to 94 from 93 in headline and lead)
* Defendant Hanning to face testimony of camp witnesses
* First of four Holocaust trials in coming months
* But may be the last ones due to defendants' old age
By Tina Bellon
BERLIN, Feb 11 (Reuters) - A 94-year-old former guard at
Auschwitz goes on trial in Germany on Thursday accused of being
an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people - the
first of four such court cases that could be the last due to the
very old age of the defendants.
The three men and one woman accused are all in their
nineties and will be tried over the next few months,
starting with Reinhold Hanning in the western
German city of Detmold.
Hanning was 20 years old in 1942 when he started serving as
a guard at the Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland where
more than 1.1 million Jews were killed by the Nazis.
Prosecutors said he voluntarily joined the armed SS at the
age of 18 and participated in battles in eastern Europe during
the early stages of World War Two before being transferred to
Auschwitz in January 1942.
Accused by the prosecutor's office in Dortmund as well as by
38 joint plaintiffs from Hungary, Israel, Canada, Great Britain,
the United States and Germany, Hanning will face the accounts of
contemporary camp witnesses.
One of them is Erna de Vries, who in 1943 at the age of 23
was deported to Auschwitz along with her mother. Considered a
"Jewish crossbreed" as her father was Protestant, she was saved
from the gas chamber and transferred to a labour camp.
"I survived, but up until today I don't know how exactly my
mother was killed," de Vries told Reuters ahead of the trial.
"The last thing she said to me was, 'You will survive and tell
what happened to us.'
"I am not hateful but it somehow feels like justice to see
this man, who was working there when my mother died, on trial,"
die Vries added.
Investigations by Germany's special Nazi war crimes office
in Ludwigsburg show that Hanning served as a guard at Auschwitz
until at least June 1944.
While Hanning admitted to his guard duties in a statement to
the prosecution, he denied involvement in the mass killings.
But investigators say he also served at Auschwitz's Birkenau
sub-division where about 90 percent of more than 1.2 million
killings in the camp were carried out in four gas chambers.
Prosecutors maintain that the Nazis' killing machinery
hinged on people like Hanning guarding the prisoners and accuses
him of expediting, or at least facilitating, the murders.
Precedence for such charges was set in 2011 when death camp
guard Ivan Demjanjuk was convicted of being an accessory to mass
murder.
Given the age of the accused, trials are delayed due to
lengthy procedures to determine whether they are fit to be in
court. Hearings are also restricted to two hours per day.
But Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, responsible for war crime
investigations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said age should
not be viewed as an obstacle to prosecution.
"When you think of these cases, don't think of frail, old,
sick men and women, but of young people who devoted their
energies to a system that implemented the (Nazis' so-called)
Final Solution and aimed to obliterate the Jewish people,"
Zuroff told Reuters by phone from his office in Jerusalem.
(Editing by Mark Heinrich)