German court sentences 94-year-old to four years in prison after finding him guilty of being accessory to murder of 300,000 people

A 94-year-old German who worked as a bookkeeper at the Auschwitz death camp has been convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people and sentenced to four years in prison, in what could be one of the last big Holocaust trials.

Oskar Gröning did not kill anyone himself while working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the second world war, but prosecutors argued that by sorting the banknotes taken from the trainloads of arriving Jews he helped support a regime responsible for mass murder.

White-haired Gröning, who has been on trial since April, has admitted moral guilt but said it was up to the court to decide whether he was legally guilty.

He said this month he could only ask God to forgive him as he was not entitled to ask this of victims of the Holocaust.

The trial went to the heart of the question of whether people who were small cogs in the Nazi machinery, but did not actively participate in the killing of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, were guilty of crimes. Until recently, the answer from the German justice system was no.

During his time at Auschwitz, Gröning’s job was to collect the belongings of the deportees after they arrived by train and had been put through a selection process that resulted in many being sent directly to the gas chambers.

Gröning, 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 banknotes that were inside and sending them on to SS offices in Berlin, where they helped to fund the Nazi war effort.

Prosecutors concentrated the charge on the period between May and July 1944, the time of the mass deportation of Hungary’s Jewish community during which 137 trains brought 425,000 people to Auschwitz, of which at least 300,000 were exterminated in the gas chambers.

During that period guards worked around the clock as the trains rolled in, sometimes several at once, to ensure as many Jews were murdered as possible as the war began drawing to a close.

Many Germans are keen to draw a line under the Holocaust and seal the postwar democratic identity of their nation. Some find distasteful the pursuit of old men, often in poor health, for crimes committed nearly 70 years ago.

Gröning, who uses a walking frame, is frail and in May the court decided to limit the time he spent in the courtroom to three hours a day in view of his health problems, which had led to delays.

In court in April Gröning was pushed by a prosecutor to answer whether he knew what the SS stood for when he volunteered to join it. He replied: “It is hard to describe it to someone of your generation who was not there. It is simply inexplicable.”

As a young SS recruit he recalled being assigned a special and secret task, and was called along with other young men to a marble-clad conference room in the heart of the Nazi power centre in Berlin to swear an oath of allegiance to the Third Reich.

“They told us that we had to sign up on the spot to certain obligations regarding tasks we would be given that would be unpleasant but that had to be done in order to ensure the final victory,” he said. But he insisted he had not known that Auschwitz was a factory of death until after his arrival there in the autumn of 1942.

“I knew it was a place that I didn’t want to be, that made me scared, but I didn’t know why,” he said. On his first evening, he and the other SS newcomers had been plied with vodka by their superiors. It was revealed to them that Jews arriving at Auschwitz who were considered unsuitable for slave labour were “disposed of”.

“It completely shook me,” he said. “I had had five glasses of vodka and continued to think about it when I woke up next morning.” He claimed that a breakthrough moment when his “enthusiasm for Adolf” began to wane had come several weeks into his arrival when a crying baby was discovered hidden in one of the suitcases, likely left by a mother who had hoped to prevent its death.

He witnessed an SS guard pick the baby out and smash it against a lorry. “It was the worst moment of any I had experienced,” he said. “The next day I went to see my head of department and told him I wanted out of the whole business. My precise formulation was: ‘If things like that are always happening here, what a shitty dump this is, and I want out.”

He succeeded in securing a transfer only after making his third application, he said in April.

The trial marks the second attempt to bring Gröning to court. An investigation that began in 1978 collapsed seven years later with prosecutors ruling that unless it could be proven that Gröning was directly responsible for the deaths of prisoners, he could not be put on trial. But since the 2012 conclusion of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Munich, in which judges ruled he was an accessory to mass murder simply by working at the Sobibor extermination camp, a change of practice has taken place, in which an individual’s mere presence at a concentration camp coupled with the knowledge they knew what was happening there, is sufficient to secure a conviction.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/auschwitz-guard-oskar-groening-jailed-over-mass-murder

Definitely a show trial. Will they be jailing the modern day nazis who run the European parliaments? Yeah nah doubt it.

Seems to me he was braver than most, asking for a transfer after witnessing the baby incident. Can't believe the court could come to this conclusion.

Thoughts on the moral and legal justifications and implications of this?

i cried a little reading about the baby. After have two children the thought of shit like that really disturbs me.

But yes what would anyone else have done at the time just fall in to line of what you were told.

He didnt actually kill anyone and sounds like he was as someone else suggested he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

People these days can't say what it would have been like how can you judge someone from something that happened year ago. Unless he was holding a gun murdering people just leave it alone i think.

This is coming from someone who's grandfather is a polish jew.

Geez the channel 10 reporting on this is some pro-Zionist propaganda.

So what do her descendants and people like me make of today’s verdict? Well, we are quietly but firmly grateful. Grateful that we live in a society where civilisation and courtroom justice has triumphed over senseless barbarism and vengeance.

Of course, the childish part of me is still silently seething. Gröning and Hitler’s other executioners don’t deserve to benefit from the civic values they worked so hard to dismantle.

Fucking blokes talking about being "irrational" and "zionists" propaganda. Give me a break.

I wonder how "rational" you'd act if your mother, father, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins were systematically murdered.

Talk is very, very cheap.

Not a single person here has ever experienced the horrors of WW2 but still profess to ponce around here offered unqualified opinions on this that and the other like they're a friggin expert.

Punch yourselves square in the face.

Is this legit? Did you even read the article?

Is this legit? Did you even read the article?

What I object to are fucksticks saying I think the reaction of many (but by no means all) Jewish people to the Holocaust is utterly, utterly wrong. It's all about bloodlust and subordinating (and sacrificing) other people for the sake of protecting and enabling the prosperity of the Jewish people." when they have never, ever experienced anything close to what some people went through during the war.

Walk a mile in their shoes and then come on here and say whether Jewish people have a right to feel aggrieved or not.

I wonder how "rational" you'd act if your mother, father, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins were systematically murdered.

You can't have been reading too well because no one has explicitly said anything of the sort.

They are not comments about whether or not the sentence was just retribution for his "crimes" they are statements on the Jewish reaction to the horrors they have experienced which is why I commented

What a bunch of [size=6]Zionist-driven crap[/size]. This [size=6]"trial"[/size] is purely politically motivated to keep the holocaust in people's minds, because after all it is literally the onlybad thing to ever happen in history.

I wish [size=6]bloodthirsty Jews[/size] like the one you linked Quickflick would think about the hypocrisy of their actions. I thought the holocaust was supposed to remind us of the horrors that raw, unfettered hatred brings us. It reminds us of how vengeance and and unthinking hatred leads us to things like what we saw at Auschwitz.



Yet these people are guilty of the same things the Nazi's were (obviously to a far lesser degree, albeit). [size=6]They irrationally target people purely out of some sick desire for revenge and vengeance[/size].

For shame.

No, they are statements made in regards to specific examples and/or individuals and this is is clear when you read the entirety of their posts rather than taking sentences out of context so that they fall in line with your point.

Obviously I have a comprehension problem.

It would certainly seem that way.

"What a bunch of Zionist-driven crap."

Let's just take one of those statements and look at it for a second.

Explain to me why "trial" is in inverted commas?

Inverted commas imply that the trial was illegitimate. Why?

Because based on the facts within that article it seems unfathomable that a court of justice could find this man guilty of such crimes.

Because based on the facts within that article [size=6]it seems unfathomable that a court of justice could find this man guilty of such crimes[/size].

It would certainly seem that way.