Former Auschwitz guard apologizes at trial; says it was ‘nightmare’ - THE JIM BAKKER SHOW By Elke Ahlswede

Defendant Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former guard at Auschwitz death camp, arrives for the continuation of his trial in Detmold, Germany, April 29, 2016. REUTERS/Bernd Thissen/Pool

DETMOLD, Germany (Reuters) – A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard on trial in Germany apologized in court to victims on Friday, telling them he regretted being part of a “criminal organization” that had killed so many people and caused such suffering.

“I’m ashamed that I knowingly let injustice happen and did nothing to oppose it”, said Reinhold Hanning, a former Nazi SS officer, seated in a wheelchair in the court in Detmold.

Hanning is charged with being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people.

Holocaust survivors, who detailed their horrific experiences at the trial which opened in February, have pleaded with the accused to break his silence in what could be one of the last Holocaust court cases in Germany.

Hanning finally broke the silence he kept over the course of 12 hearings, each limited to two hours due to his old age.

Reading in a firm voice from a paper he took out of his gray suit pocket, he said: “I want to tell you that I deeply regret having been part of a criminal organization that is responsible for the death of many innocent people, for the destruction of countless families, for misery, torment and suffering on the side of the victims and their relatives”.

“I have remained silent for a long time, I have remained silent all of my life,” he added.

Just before, his lawyer, Johannes Salmen, had given a detailed account of the defendant’s view of his life and particularly his time in Auschwitz.

In this 22-page long declaration, Hanning admitted having known about mass murder in the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

“I’ve tried to repress this period for my whole life. Auschwitz was a nightmare, I wish I had never been there,” the lawyer cited Hanning as saying.

The accused was sent there after being wounded in battle and his request to rejoin his comrades on the front had been rejected twice, he said.

“I accept his apology but I can’t forgive him,” said Leon Schwarzbaum, a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor and co-plaintiff.

She said Hanning should have recounted everything that happened in Auschwitz and “what he took part in”.

Although Hanning is not charged with having been directly involved in any killings at the camp, prosecutors accuse him of facilitating the slaughter in his capacity as a guard at the camp where 1.2 million people, most of them Jews, were killed.

A precedent for such charges was set in 2011, when death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk was convicted.

Accused by the prosecutor’s office in Dortmund as well as by 40 joint plaintiffs from Hungary, Israel, Canada, Britain, the United States and Germany, Hanning is said to have joined the SS forces voluntarily at the age of 18 in 1940.

Hanning on Friday said however that his stepmother, a member of the Nazi-party, urged him to join.

A verdict is expected on May 27.

Germany is holding what are likely to be its last trials linked to the Holocaust, in which more than six million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis.

In addition to Hanning, one other man and one woman in their 90s are accused of being accessories to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people at Auschwitz.

A third man who was a member of the Nazi SS guard team at Auschwitz died at the age of 93 this month, days before his trial was due to start.

(Writing by Elke Ahlswede and Joseph Nasr; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Nazi Nightmare Ends for War Criminal's Son

Thursday, January 15, 2015 |  Charles Gardner  ISRAEL TODAY

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Being brought up as the son of a Nazi was a burden hard to bear for Werner Oder, an Austrian born in the aftermath of the Holocaust. His father Wilhelm had presided over the murder of many Jews as he trained men in the art of killing at a camp in Poland during World War II.

But in spite of all attempts at denial and covering up the truth, his complicity in the massacre of defenseless men, women and children came to haunt his son – quite literally.

As a small boy, Werner, now 64, regularly woke up screaming from horrific nightmares – a demonic entity actually rising up from a hole in the floor to frighten the life out of him – and he developed into a sickly child as a result.

His father had somehow escaped immediate post-war punishment on account of apparent lack of sufficient evidence, but Werner saw little of him anyway as he was a serial adulterer. Eventually the legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal uncovered the truth of his wicked crimes, but he died of a heart attack just before his trial.

Werner, meanwhile, whose two half-brothers had served in the Hitler Youth, was growing into an angry young man bent on destruction as the psychological damage caused by his family’s involvement with the Nazi death cult manifested itself in aggressive, drunken behavior and self-harm.

“I wanted to be accepted and loved, but the more I tried to be acceptable, the more rejection I felt,” he recalls in his book Battling with Nazi Demons.

He tried to kill himself by swallowing an entire box of tranquilizers his mother kept for her own peace of mind. But he desperately wanted help nevertheless. He remembered how, as a small boy in the throes of his recurring nightmares, he somehow prayed to God for help – even though he knew nothing about God, having been brought up in a completely pagan environment.

His mother was so touched on hearing him that she wrote it down on a slip of paper: “Dear God, look upon me your little child and have mercy on my tears. I do not want to die. If you let me live I will serve you.”

And God did not forget him as the answer finally came many years later in the form of a Christian missionary from over the mountains with whom he came into contact.

He heard that Jesus offered release from the “visitors from hell” that had plagued him all those years. He could hardly believe it was true, but when he invited Christ into his life, he was suddenly and miraculously freed from all the demons that had strangled his mind, spirit and body for so long.

“Kneeling to confess my sin and my need of forgiveness and deliverance, it seemed as if the weight of the whole world rolled off my shoulders," said Werner. "With tears, I sensed the light of God flooding my mind, driving out the darkness of despair and fear. Like chains, the troubles of my soul fell off; my sanity returned and I knew from that moment that God’s only Son Jesus Christ had come to set this prisoner free. From that day, all demons left and my nightmares stopped.”

For the past 30 years Werner has been pastor of the Tuckton Christian Centre in Dorset, England. Not only has he made friends with a Polish Jew who had witnessed and given evidence of his father’s cruelty in court, but he is now a passionate supporter of Israel and the Jews.

And he believes the Church itself was complicit in the Holocaust, which resulted in the death of six million Jews.

Martin Luther, for all his positive contribution to the Reformation in restoring the place of faith in Christ rather than religious observances as the key to salvation, had unfortunately ended his life by publishing terrible anti-Semitic rants, which later served as clerical endorsement for Hitler.

Werner sees a direct correlation between anti-Semitism and denial of the Holy Spirit’s work and relates how, shortly after the modern-day Pentecostal movement emerged on the scene at the turn of the 20th century, a group of 56 German evangelicals (those who believe in the Bible’s absolute authority) met to discuss whether or not it was of divine origin and decided, in what is known as the Berlin Declaration, that it was “of the devil”.

As Werner told a conference in York, this amounted to blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, which even Jesus said was unforgivable.

“They turned out the light in Europe, and we’re still paying the price for it,” he said. “The Holy Spirit was knocking on the door of the church in Europe and saying, ‘The darkness is coming. I want to empower you to resist the Nazis and protect my people’.”

Battling with Nazi Demons is published by Onwards & Upwards, with a foreword by author and international speaker David Pawson, and is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

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Tortured in Ukraine: Christians Living a Nightmare

By George Thomas

CBN News Sr. Reporter

Thursday, September 18, 2014

EASTERN UKRAINE -- Ukraine's evangelical Christians are bearing the brunt of the country's conflict, often with deadly consequences.

It's a scene that has played in Elena Velichko's head over and over. Pro-Russian rebels took over her hometown in early April. Her husband Vladimir told her to take the kids and leave the city.

"He took us to the train station and we said goodbye. He said, 'I love you.' He kissed me and kissed the children and left," Elena said.

Several days later, her life and that of her eight children, ages 2 to 16, suddenly turned upside down.

Surreal Reality

It was June 8, Pentecost Sunday. The church was half empty. That's because the city was under tremendous assault by both the pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian army.

Once the church service ended everybody made their way to the front of the church to go home.

But then the unimaginable happened.

"The church called and said my husband, along with three other believers, had been taken by men who were waiting outside the church," Elena said.

Alexander Gayvoronski, a church deacon, was there that Sunday morning.

"The men wore masks and had machine guns. They told the four Christian men to get into their cars," Gayvoronsi said.

The rebels took the pastor's sons, Ruvim and Albert Pavenko, Victor Brodarsky, and Elena's husband, Vladimir.

Multiple sources told CBN News what then happened to the four Christian captives.

First rebels took them outside the city and tortured them. The next day the men were put in car and told to drive away.

Then, minutes later they were recaptured and shot multiple times. Elena's husband was burned in the car.

"I don't hate my husband's killers. It is easy to start asking questions. Why did this happen? But if I keep thinking about this it will only wear me out," Elena said.

Christians Targeted

That same day rebels burned down the largest furniture factory that belonged to Ruvim and Albert Pavenko's father.

It had become clear rebels were targeting the city's evangelical community.

Sergey Demidovich, a top evangelical leader in Slavyansk, said Christians face constant threat.

"I never thought in the 21st century, in [a] free country as Ukraine, it was possible to experience this level of persecution," Demidovich said. "The separatists saw Protestant Christians as enemies. They viewed us as cults."

But the persecution was just getting started.

"All the Protestant churches in the city were either taken over by rebels or forced to close. We were forbidden to meet for services and the leadership forced to leave or be under risk of arrest," Demidovich said.

And the persecution is spreading far beyond just this city. Throughout the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as rebels gain more territory, assaults against evangelicals are growing.

Two pastors told CBN News they were arrested and tortured for their faith.

"If I went to Donetsk today I would be arrested at the first checkpoint and put in jail," Oleg, a pastor from Donetsk, said. "The last time I was in prison they beat me up so badly, but I kept preaching the gospel and telling them to repent."

Unwavering Faith

Many believe the persecution is linked to pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church, and the pro-Russian rebels are only happy to do their bidding.

"When I was in prison, a rebel soldier told me they have an order to kill all the Christian pastors who are not part of the Russian Orthodox Church," Anatoly, a pastor from Luhansk, said.

While that has forced some to go underground, others are deciding to stay.

"Many heroes were born out of this conflict -- men and women who are boldly sharing their faith and helping those caught in the war," Oleg said.

Elena Velichko said there's not a day that goes by that she doesn't think of that last goodbye, that final kiss she had with her husband at the train station.

But she is unwavering in her faith, trusting God to take care of her, the children, and Ukraine.

"People often ask me how I am doing. I tell them about a mighty God who can heal our hearts, maybe not as quickly as we would like it, but the process is going on and the prayers of people around the world help," Elena said.

"The biggest thing you can do for me is to pray for me and my family, about the future of my children and my country," she said.