Auschwitz Bookkeeper Gets 4 Years in Prison — for 300,000 Deaths
Image by Getty Image
A 94-year-old German man who worked as a bookkeeper at Auschwitz was sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the murder of 300,000 people at the death camp, in what could be one of the last big Holocaust trials.
Betraying little emotion, white-haired Oskar Groening sat with his arms crossed, looking around the court room while the judge explained the verdict.
After the hearing, he shuffled out of court, hunched over a walking frame with his head bowed. He remains free until a decision on whether and how much of his jail time he will have to serve.
Groening did not kill anyone himself while working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, but by sorting bank notes seized from trainloads of arriving Jews he helped support the regime responsible for mass murder, prosecutors had argued.
The trial went to the heart of the question of whether people who were minor participants in the Nazi regime, but did not actively participate in the killing of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, were guilty of crimes.
At the end of the roughly three-month trial, the judge said Groening had lived in peace and quiet since the end of the war, going unpunished for “an unfathomable crime.”
“Mr Groening is not a monster,” said Judge Franz Kompisch, adding that he had taken an easier path by avoiding fighting at the front. “You chose the safe desk job,” he told the accused.
“What you consider to be moral guilt and what you depict as being a cog in the wheel is exactly what lawmakers view as being an accessory to murder,” said Kompisch.
The now frail Groening has admitted moral guilt but said it was up to the court to decide whether he was legally guilty. He said earlier this month he could only ask God to forgive him as he was not entitled to ask this of victims of the Holocaust.
“JUSTICE DONE”
Jewish groups welcomed the verdict.
“Albeit belatedly, justice has been done,” said World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder in a statement. “Mr Groening was only a small cog in the Nazi death machine but without the actions of people like him, the mass murder of millions of Jews and others would not have been possible.”
A lawyer for some of the co-plaintiffs said he was “relieved and happy” about the conviction and that the length of any jail term was not important to his clients.
If Groening decides not to appeal, the verdict takes legal effect and then prosecutors decide when, whether and where Groening would actually go to jail, a court spokeswoman said.
During his time at Auschwitz, Groening’s job was to collect the belongings of deportees after they arrived at the camp by train and had been put through a selection process that resulted in many being sent directly to the gas chambers.
Groening, who was 21 and by his own admission an enthusiastic Nazi when he was sent to work at the camp in 1942, inspected people’s luggage, removing and counting any bank notes that were inside and sending them on to SS offices in Berlin, where they helped to fund the Nazi war effort.
The charges against him related to the period between May and July 1944 when 137 trains carrying roughly 425,000 Jews from Hungary arrived in Auschwitz. At least 300,000 of them were sent straight to the gas chambers, the indictment said.
Many Germans are keen to draw a line under the Holocaust and seal the post-war democratic identity of their nation. Some find distasteful the pursuit of old men, often in poor health, for crimes committed nearly 70 years ago.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
