'I'd gladly put a rope around the bastard's neck': Auschwitz victims' grandson reveals hatred for Nazi guard, now 93, who faces charges over murder of 170,000 Jews

• Reinhold Hanning is a former member of the Totenkopf, Death's Head division of the S.S. and at Auschwitz from 1942
• Now 93, Hanning is accused of being complicit in the murder of 170,000 people during a reign of terror at the Nazi death camp in Poland  
• During Hanning's time at Auschwitz, Tommy Lamm's grandparents and great uncle were rounded up from their home in Bratislava and taken there
• Within hours of arriving, they had their heads shaved and were sent to the gas chambers to die

By Allan Hall In Berlin for MailOnline

Published: 04:04 EST, 18 September 2015 | Updated: 08:55 EST, 18 September 2015

The grandson of a family wiped out at Auschwitz has told MailOnline of his hatred for the S.S. guard who faces trial for possibly sending his loved ones to the gas chamber.

'I would gladly travel to Germany myself, put a rope around the bastard's neck and drop him through the trap until his neck snapped,' said Tommy Lamm after it was learned Germany is considering the trial of another former death camp guard.

Prosecutors could decide as early as next week to proceed against former corporal Reinhold Hanning, who served at the Auschwitz extermination camp, and who accused of complicity in the murders of 170,000 Jews.

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Accused: Reinhold Hanning was a member of the Totenkopf, Death's Head division of the S.S at Auschwitz. Now 93, those who lost loved ones at the camp hope he will be tried for the role he played in thousands' deaths

Murdered: Tommy Lamm's grandparents Emmanuel and Giselle and great uncle Felix then 15, (pictured) were all executed at Auschwitz while SS guard Hanning served there

Cog in the killing machine: It is claimed Hanning was one of the guards who chose whether people lived or died died when they arrived at the end of this railway at Auschwitz. Mr Lamm's family were considered too young or old to work and killed 

Court officials in Detmold said they are waiting on a medical report on 93-year-old Hanning which will determine whether he is mentally competent to stand trial.

'Approval for a trial will be granted as soon as an opinion on the negotiating capacity of the accused is forwarded,' said a court spokesman.

Hanning worked on the infamous 'ramp' at the death camp in occupied Poland where a minimum of 1.2million people were murdered during the Second World War, most of them Jews. Prosecutors say he either personally selected people to live or die, or at the very least assisted those with more authority in their hideous duties.

Hanning, a member of the Totenkopf, Death's Head division of the S.S., served at the Third Reich's premier murder factory as a young man. If he is judged mentally sound, he will be the second former guard from Auschwitz to face justice this year.

While for most people he is a name from a bygone age, a face in a fading black and white photo, for Mr Lamm, now 69, he is the epitome of evil: a cog in the giant wheel of Nazism who stood on the ramp selecting prisoners to live or die - including his own flesh and blood.

For his grandparents and great uncle, when their train arrived there in 1944, it was only death which awaited them.  

Family: Siblings Erwin, Mr Lamm's father Herbert, Felix and Emmy (left to right) were born in Austria, but when the Nazis arrived in 1938, their parents took the boys to Czechoslovakia. Emmy had already run to Australia

Last journey: Mr Lamm's grandparents and great uncle, Felix, were taken to Auschwitz where they had their heads shaved and were executed within hours of arrival

Justice: Mr Lamm, now living in Israel, wants to see former S.S. guards like Reinhold Hanning who served at Auschwitz from January 1942, jailed for the atrocities that took place at the Nazi death camp 

In an exclusive interview with MailOnline from his home in Jerusalem, Mr Lamm told how his grandparents tried to flee the maw of the Holocaust, but eventually were consumed by it.

'My grandfather, Emmanuel, was born in 1888 in Austria and lived in Vienna with his wife Giselle, where he enjoyed some success as a wholesale textile merchant,' said Tommy.

'They had four children. They loved their life, they loved their country. And then the Nazis came.'

Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 and it vanished as an independent country to become the Reich province of Ostmark.

Tommy's relatives and three of their children - the eldest daughter Emmy had sailed for Australia in 1932 because she believed she had seen the lethal writing on the wall - fled to the neighbouring, and then still independent, state of Czechoslovakia.

'They settled in Bratislava,' said Tommy. 'They thought they were safe. And they were - bit only for a while.

'The Nazis moved in there in March 1939. The terror began.'

Jews were forced to wear the yellow star and banned from all professions and public life. 

'In 1944, I am not quite sure of the exact date, they came for my family,' said Mr Lamm. 

Escape: Mr Lamm's father Herbert and mother Erica managed to flee Bratislava in 1944 when the Nazi's came for their family. 'They survived by bribing people to hide them, by living on their wits,' he said

Fateful: Mr Lamm's grandparents Emmanuel and Giselle and their 15-year-old son, Felix, were doomed when they arrived at Auschwitz 'One day the knock on the door came, they were rounded up, spent several days in terrible conditions in a cattle car en-route to Auschwitz, and were gassed,' said Mr Lamm

Mr Lamm's father Herbert, who was nearly 30, managed to flee with his then girlfriend, Erica, Mr Lamm's mother, and lived underground for the next year.

'They survived by bribing people to hide them, by pretending to be gentiles, by living on their wits,' said Mr Lamm. 'My other uncle, Herbert's brother Erwin, made it to London and safety.

Fight for justice: Tommy Lamm (pictured), who now lives in Israel, wants to see former SS guard Reinhold Hanning jailed for his role during WWII

'But there was to be no such luck for my grandparents and their 15-year-old son, Felix. One day the knock on the door came, they were rounded up, spent several days in terrible conditions in a cattle car en-route to Auschwitz, and were gassed.'

The ages of all three played against them - the parents judged too old to work, Felix too young. Within hours of arrival they had been stripped, their heads shaved and then they were murdered: a small fragment of the mosaic of mass killing that was the Nazi extermination programme.

'It affected me in many different ways,' said father-of-three Mr Lamm, who lived immediately after the war in Australia before emigrating to Israel in 1970.

'There was this huge gap where my grandparents should have been. My father tried to fill in as much as he could. He was lucky to survive the war too.

'Just six weeks before the war ended the Nazis caught him in a round up and sent him to the camp of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. This was a way-station en-route to the extermination camps.

'But the Reich was collapsing by then. In the chaos and confusion he managed to hang on.

'For my grandparents and Felix, there was no such luck. They were murdered simply because they were Jews.

'Now I have heard that Hanning is to go on trial I am tormented by the fact that he may have been the one who sent them to their deaths. 

'I am appalled to hear that he is trying to play the dementia card, to escape justice. This cannot happen. 

'I don't care if they are 100 years old, or 150. They deserve the same fate as they meeted out. I would gladly travel to Germany to kill this monster if I could.'

If the trial goes ahead it will be the second Auschwitz process this year. In July, Oskar Groening, 94, was sentenced to four years' prison for his role in the murders of 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz in the late summer of 1944. But due to his age he has not served a single day behind bars.

Now the likelihood seems that Hanning will be greenlighted for prosecution. He was an S.S. Unterscharfuehfrer - junior squad commander, roughly translating to a lance corporal in the British Army - from 1943 to 1944 at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. 

Convicted: Oskar Groening, 94, was sentenced to four years' prison for his role in the murders of 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz between May and June 1944

In a handwritten CV he produced for his superiors while at the camp, he wrote: 'From the day of my release from apprenticeship I worked in a factory. I joined the Hitler youth on 20.4.1935. On the 25.7.1940 I joined as a volunteer in the Waffen-S.S.'

The Waffen S.S. was the fighting arm of the organisation. As a soldier on active service he took part in the invasions of The Netherlands and France, and later fought in Yugoslavia and Russia.

His CV continued: 'I was wounded in the east on the 20.09.1941. On the 21.1.43 I was transferred to the S.S at Auschwitz.' 

There he worked, according to indictment the prosecutor in Dortmund, as a camp guard.

He has admitted to being there but denies participation in any of the murders committed there. 

Prosecutors argue that because he was there, he was part of the murder machine and therefore guilty. They have records of his service in the camp which show that he was on duty when at least 170,000 Jews were gassed.

German prosecutors are also considering bringing charges against other death camp guards, but some have played the dementia card to escape justice.

A 94-year-old farmer from the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hubert Zafke, who worked as a hospital orderly in the emergency medical services squadron of the S.S., was accused of aiding and abetting the murders of thousands of Jews.

Brutality: Groening testified during his three-month trial that he was so horrified by the crimes he witnessed at the camp after his arrival in 1942 that he appealed three times to his superiors for a transfer 

He was on duty when Jewish diarist Anne Frank arrived. Anne came in on a train carrying 498 men, 442 women and 79 children from Holland's Westerbork concentration camp on September 5, 1944, prosecution documents show.

Anne, whose memoir of a life in hiding from the Nazis became the single most poignant piece of Holocaust literature, was later transferred to the Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where she died early in 1945. Only her father would survive the war.  

The Neubrandenburg state court in June confirmed that experts had determined that Zafke was unfit for trial and that his condition was worsening.

In February, state prosecutors opened an investigation into 93-year-old Hilde Michnia, who served as a guard in the Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen concentration camps.

Michnia, was 22 years old when she was conscripted by the SS to do camp duty.

She is suspected of forcing prisoners on an evacuation march in 1945 during which approximately 1,400 women died.

Another 92-year-old man who served at Auschwitz is accused of 'active participation' in the murders of 1,075 people from Holland, France and Germany at the Nazi death camp

The unnamed man will be tried before a juvenile court because of his age when he was employed by the S.S. at Auschwitz.

He is accused of 'active participation' in the murders of 1,075 people from three groups who, in the words of prosecutors, were 'killed in an awful and malevolent manner'.

The victims had arrived at the main killing centre of the Third Reich from France, Holland and the reich capital, Berlin.

Prosecutors said they are limiting the case to these three deportations for 'legal reasons' and due to the amount of evidence they have in these cases.

Facing charges: Hilde Michnia was 23 when she was a guard at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Michnia is one of a number of former guards facing prosecution for the murder of Jews in the Second World War

They said he was a willing participant in the 'cruel system' of Auschwitz and 'part of the industrialised mass murder machine.'

He has not been named and, like some 50 people recently investigated in Germany, there is no guarantee he will eventually make it into the dock of the Youth Court in the town of Hanau.

Mr Lamm in Jerusalem admits he has had a full life. He earned a B.A. from Monash University in Melbourne and for 20 years, he worked in the English Department of the Aliyah Department of the Jewish Agency. 

He spent two years in England as the director of the Jewish Settlement in England and Northern countries and went on to work for the Jewish Agency.

He added: 'I detest the bastards who served in Auschwitz for what they did - to millions, not just my family. 

'I hope that the authorities in Germany will see sense and put this man on trial, to learn of the crimes he and others committed. We owe it to history.'

Efraim Zuroff of the Nazi hunting Simon Wiesenthal agency in Jerusalem, added: 'Dementia is too easy a card for these people to play. 

'We want to see every last one of them brought to trial, brought to justice, for the world to know what they did.' 

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