A German court denied an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor the opportunity to testify at a former Nazi SS guard's trial Friday, NBC News reported.
Joshua Kaufman, who traveled from Los Angeles to Germany, planned to talk about how he removed bodies from gas chambers at Auschwitz death camp. Around 1.2 million people — most of them Jews — were killed at the site.
Reinhold Hanning, 94, is on trial accused of being accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people. Although Hanning was not directly involved in any killings at Auschwitz, prosecutors accuse him of facilitating the slaughter in his capacity as a guard at the camp.
Judge Anke Grudda stressed that the decision was based entirely on German law and was not out of "reasons of respect or disrespect."
"It is not fair," Kaufman told NBC News. "They know who I am. I lost my whole family, I survived five concentration camps and I represent the dead people. They should at least respect me."
