Indictment against Hanna

The indictment against Hanna Schmitz organizes the trial around two principal charges: the monthly selection of prisoners for return to Auschwitz and the failure to unlock a church where prisoners were trapped during a bombing. Read over a day and a half in the cautious, repetitive language of allegation, it gives the court a framework for assigning responsibility. Yet its claims must be tested against fragmentary testimony, archival records, and Hanna’s admissions—including her admission that she wrote a report connected to the events.## The Charges and Their Background In the second week of the trial, the indictment took a day and a half to read. Its repeated formulations—what a defendant was alleged to have done and which legal conditions the acts might satisfy—made the document a sustained sequence of claims rather than a simple account of settled facts. Hanna was the fourth of five accused women.

The five defendants had served as guards at a small satellite camp near Cracow. They were transferred there from Auschwitz in early 1944 to replace guards killed or injured in a factory explosion. The indictment included a charge concerning their conduct at Auschwitz, but the narrator recalls it as minor beside the other counts and admits uncertainty about why it seemed so: it may have involved the other defendants rather than Hanna, or simply seemed less important than the later charges.

One principal count concerned the camp’s monthly selections. Around sixty women arrived from Auschwitz each month, and a similar number were sent back, less those who had died. The indictment’s account rested on the known consequence of those returns: prisoners judged no longer able to perform useful factory work were sent back to Auschwitz to be killed. Although the factory produced munitions, the women’s work was largely raw construction to repair damage from the explosion.

The other principal count concerned the end of the prisoners’ westward march. Several hundred women had been locked in a village church during a bombing. The building caught fire, and the heavy doors remained locked; the defendants could have opened them but did not, and the prisoners inside died. This charge placed the guards’ responsibility at the center of the case, while the indictment’s legal language framed the question of what each woman had done or failed to do.## Evidence, Limits, and Responsibility The indictment’s claims did not rest on a complete view of events. The two survivors of the church fire—a mother and daughter—could testify to what they experienced inside, but not to what happened outside the church. The daughter had written a book about the camp and the march west and published it in America. She came to Germany to testify; her mother remained in Israel, where the court, prosecutors, and defense lawyers traveled to take her deposition. The narrator was not present for that part of the trial.

For the selection charge, the survivors’ testimony and the daughter’s book were the main evidence. The narrator observes that a competent defense could have raised reasonable doubt about whether the defendants themselves had made the selections: witnesses could not identify responsibility precisely amid the commandant, troops, other guards, and hierarchy of orders. The indictment therefore named grave conduct, but the available evidence did not automatically resolve who had carried it out.

The church charge also involved a gap between what witnesses could see and what the court needed to establish. Villagers remembered speaking with the defendants, confirming that they had been there. But their testimony about the night could expose the villagers themselves to the question of whether they might have overpowered the guards and opened the doors. The defendants, in turn, might claim that they had been compelled by troops who remained or whom the guards expected to return. The indictment’s allegations thus entered a contest among partial accounts, possible defenses, and the question of who had the power and duty to act.## The Report and Hanna’s Admission At the hearing, the defendants repeatedly denied that they could have opened the church doors, offering explanations that included shock, tending to wounded guards, and failing to notice the fire. An archival report complicated those statements. It listed guards killed or wounded at the priest’s house, those who took wounded men to a field hospital, and those who accompanied the transport. It also indicated that female guards remained behind to prevent fires from spreading and prisoners from escaping, and referred to the prisoners’ deaths. Because the defendants’ names did not appear in the report’s lists of those killed, wounded, or sent to the hospital, the narrator infers that they may have been among the guards who stayed behind.

The report did not simply settle the dispute: the defendants said it was false and questioned whether the responsibilities it described could have been carried out. One accused woman then blamed Hanna, claiming that Hanna had written the report to conceal her own guilt and implicate the others. Hanna initially denied writing it and asked whether authorship mattered. When a prosecutor proposed comparing the report’s handwriting with hers, Hanna became alarmed and admitted that she had written it.

That admission links the indictment’s account of the camp to Hanna’s inability to read or write, which the narrator recognizes after the handwriting dispute. He connects this fact to her earlier dependence on others to read to her, her avoidance of work promotions that would expose her illiteracy, and her fear when faced with the daughter’s book and the indictment. These connections explain why the written case could leave Hanna unable to identify openings for a defense, but they do not resolve the moral question the trial raises: whether her shame can account for her admissions or for the crimes charged. The indictment is therefore both a legal statement of alleged responsibility and the occasion on which the difference between explaining Hanna’s conduct and excusing it becomes unavoidable.