Jessica Durando

USA TODAY

A 94-year-old former Auschwitz concentration camp guard went on trial in Germany on Thursday for being an accessory in the murders of at least 170,000 Jews at the notorious Nazi death camp in Poland.

Reinhold Hanning, who is being tried in the city of Detmold, admitted he was a guard from 1943 to 1944 at the camp but denied involvement in mass murder, the BBC reports. Hanning is accused of working in the camp when Hungarian Jews were gassed.

Hanning did not give an opening statement to the court.

Prosecutor Andreas Brendel told the Associated Press that guards in the camp also assisted guards at the Birkenau section of the massive death camp complex where Jews were brought in by train.

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

Johannes Salmen, Hanning's attorney, said his client did not serve at the Birkenau section.

Auschwitz survivor Leon Schwarzbaum, 94, of Berlin was the first witness to testify. "Mr. Hanning, we are about the same age and we will both soon be before the highest court," Schwarzbaum said, according to the AP. "Speak here about what you and your comrades did!"

A German legal precedent was set after the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, a former U.S. autoworker, that a person may be tried on the basis of serving as a camp guard without any evidence of being involved in a specific killing. The judge scheduled 12 sessions, limited to two hours a day, because of Hanning's health.

Hanning's trial is one of four expected this year against two other former Nazi men and one woman charged with serving in the death camp, the AP said.

An estimated 960,000 Jews were killed at Auschwitz, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and Birkenau near Krakow in south-central Poland in January 1945.

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