Auschwitz bookkeeper admits ‘moral guilt’
Print Edition
FORMER SS officer Oskar Groening, dubbed the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” asked for “forgiveness” over his role in mass murder at the Nazi death camp, as his trial began yesterday.
“For me there’s no question that I share moral guilt,” the 93-year-old former Nazi told German judges, admitting that he knew about the gassing of Jews and other prisoners.
“I ask for forgiveness,” he said at the trial, which was attended by almost 70 Holocaust survivors and victims’ relatives.
“You have to decide on my legal culpability,” Groening told the court in the northern city of Lueneburg near Hamburg.
Given the advanced age of most German war crimes suspects, Groening is expected to be among the last to face justice, 70 years after the liberation of the concentration camps at the end of World War II.
He is being tried on 300,000 counts of “accessory to murder” in the cases of deported Hungarian Jews who were sent to the gas chambers, and faces up to 15 years in jail.
Prosecutors said Groening served as a bookkeeper, who sorted and counted the money taken from those killed, collecting cash in different currencies from across Europe.
He also performed “ramp duty,” guarding luggage stolen from deportees as they arrived by rail at the extermination and forced labour camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, they said.
The bespectacled Groening — who entered court using a walking aid, wearing a white dress shirt and beige sleeveless jumper — admitted to performing those tasks. He spoke for over an hour, without a break.
Many of the over 100 co-plaintiffs, witnesses, and lawyers listened to him via simultaneous translations in English, Hebrew and Hungarian.
Auschwitz survivor and co-plaintiff Eva Kor, 81, said before the trial that “he is a murderer because he was part of the system of mass murder.”
After Groening’s testimony, Romanian-born Kor expressed appreciation for his attempt to shine a light on his dark past.
“He’s very old, and meeting him face-to-face makes me realize that he did the best that he can do with his mind and his body, because he has a lot of difficulties physically and, I’m sure, emotionally,” she told reporters outside the court.
Groening, unlike most former Nazis, has spoken at length in a string of media interviews about what he did and saw at Auschwitz, although he’s insisted he was not personally guilty of harming any inmates.
Prosecutors say that by serving at the camp, he played a role in the mass murder of over a million people, building their case around 300,000 deaths from May to July 1944.
Groening had previously been cleared by German courts, but the legal basis for prosecuting ex-Nazis changed in 2011 with the trial of former death camp guard John Demjanjuk.
While previously courts had punished defendants for individual atrocities, Demjanjuk, a former Ukrainian citizen and later Ohio auto worker, was convicted solely on the basis of having served at a camp, Sobibor, also in occupied Poland.
The trial is currently scheduled to run until July 29.
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