The now 94-year-old Oskar Groening, who was a Nazi guard at Auschwitz has been convicted by a German court for being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews. At the death camp he was responsible for the “bookkeeping”, inventorying the belongings confiscated from prisoners.Groening had admitted “moral guilt” but his lawyers argued that he did not facilitate genocide, while prosecutors said he helped the camp run smoothly.
Photo from CBC News (at trial)
According to the BBC:
Delivering the verdict, Judge Franz Kompisch said Groening had willingly taken a “safe desk job” in a system that was “inhumane and all but unbearable for the human psyche”.
Oskar Groening is expected to be one of the last Nazis to face trial considering their age. He has been one of the few Nazis put on trial who has chosen to speak about the Holocaust, arguing that he wishes to silence Holocaust deniers.
“I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria,” he told the BBC in the 2005 documentary Auschwitz: the Nazis and the “Final Solution”.
“I was on the ramp when the selections [for the gas chambers] took place.”
From Jenny Hill, BBC News at the trial:
Oskar Groening joked with his lawyers as the court waited for the judge to arrive to deliver his verdict.
Watching him carefully was a small elderly man with bright eyes. Leon Schwarzbaum was 22 when he was transported to Auschwitz. He told me he is now 94 – the same age as Groening.
He pointed to the tattooed numbers on his arm. “When they punched this on my arm they told me no-one lasts long in Auschwitz.”
After the verdict, I saw him again; four years is the right sentence, he said, after all he’s an old man.
Can he forgive Oskar Groening, I asked? “No,” he replied. “I lost 30 members of my family in Auschwitz.”
Oskar Groening’s case focused upon the question of if those with minor roles in the Nazi-ordered genocide of Jews and did not actively kill any Jews were still guilty of the crime.