Advertisement

We need your help now

Support from readers like you keeps The Journal open.

You are visiting us because we have something you value. Independent, unbiased news that tells the truth. Advertising revenue goes some way to support our mission, but this year it has not been enough.

If you've seen value in our reporting, please contribute what you can, so we can continue to produce accurate and meaningful journalism. For everyone who needs it.

oskar groening

Bookkeeper of Auschwitz receives his sentence for 300k counts of accessory to murder

Groening yesterday seized a last opportunity to address the judges and said he was “very sorry”.

Germany Auschwitz Trial Oskar Groening Markus Schreiber / AP/Press Association Images Markus Schreiber / AP/Press Association Images / AP/Press Association Images

A FORMER NAZI SS officer known as the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz has been sentenced at a German court to four years in prison, in what is expected to be one of the last Holocaust trials.

Oskar Groening (94) sat impassively as judge Franz Kompisch said “the defendant is found guilty of accessory to murder in 300,000 legally connected cases” of deported Jews who were sent to the gas chambers in 1944.

Groening served as a bookkeeper at the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, sorting and counting the money taken from those killed or used as slave labour, collecting cash in different European currencies, and shipping it back to his Nazi bosses in Berlin.

The sentence was longer than the three and a half years prosecutors had demanded in the court in the northern city of Lueneburg, which has been hearing the case since April.

Groening yesterday seized a last opportunity to address the judges and said he was “very sorry” for his time stationed at the concentration camp, telling them that “no one should have taken part in Auschwitz”.

Germany Auschwitz Trial Oskar Groening sits in ths sun during the noon break of the trial against him in Lueneburg in April. Markus Schreiber / AP/Press Association Images Markus Schreiber / AP/Press Association Images / AP/Press Association Images

“I know that. I sincerely regret not having lived up to this realisation earlier and more consistently. I am very sorry,” he said, his voice wavering.

A group of Holocaust survivors said in a statement released after the verdict “we welcome the conviction of Oskar Groening”, calling it a “very late step toward justice”.

Groening had testified in April and again this month that he was so horrified by the crimes he witnessed at the camp after his arrival in 1942 that he appealed three times to his superiors for a transfer to the front, which was not granted until autumn 1944.

Groening has acknowledged “moral guilt” but said it is up to the court to rule on his legal culpability seven decades after the Holocaust.

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, 2015

Read: ‘I share guilt for the Holocaust, and I can’t ask for forgiveness’ >

Your Voice
Readers Comments
70
    Submit a report
    Please help us understand how this comment violates our community guidelines.
    Thank you for the feedback
    Your feedback has been sent to our team for review.