Lueneburg: A German court yesterday sentenced a former Nazi SS officer known as the “Book-keeper of Auschwitz” to four years in jail, in what was expected to be one of the last Holocaust trials.
Oskar Groening, 94, sat impassively in the packed courtroom as judge Franz Kompisch said “the defendant is found guilty of accessory to murder in 300,000 legally connected cases” of Hungarian Jews sent to the gas chambers from May to July 1944.
He said Groening had willingly taken a “safe desk job” in “a machinery designed entirely for the killing” of human beings, a system that by any standard was “inhumane and all but unbearable for the human psyche”.
Groening served as an accountant at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland, sorting and counting the money taken from those killed or used as slave labour, and shipping it back to his Nazi superiors in Berlin. He also on several occasions performed “ramp duty”, processing deportees as they arrived by rail in cattle cars.
The sentence was longer than the three and a half years prosecutors had demanded in the high-profile case which opened in April in the northern city of Lueneburg.
Groening on Tuesday seized a last opportunity to address the judges and said he was “very sorry” for his time stationed at the concentration camp. “No one should have taken part in Auschwitz,” he said, his voice wavering. “I know that. I sincerely regret not having lived up to this realisation earlier and more consistently.”
Defence attorney Hans Holtermann said he would review the verdict before deciding whether to appeal. But court observers said it was unlikely Groening, who was not in custody during the trial, would ever serve time in prison given his advanced age and deteriorating health.
A medical team will evaluate whether Groening is physically capable of withstanding incarceration, and any sentence would only begin after any appeals are heard, prosecution spokeswoman Kathrin Soefker said. “He can go home today as he normally would,” she said.
Holocaust survivors and victims’ relatives who were co-plaintiffs welcomed the verdict as a “very late step toward justice”. “SS members such as Groening who took part in the murder of our families have created lifelong and unbearable suffering for us,” they said in a statement.
“Neither the criminal proceedings nor the words of the accused can alleviate this suffering. But it gives us satisfaction that now the perpetrators cannot evade prosecution as long as they live.” Some 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, perished between 1940 and 1945 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp before it was liberated by Soviet forces.
AFP
