Joel Saget, AFP file picture | The entrance to the Nazi death-camp Auschwitz. The banner reads: "Work makes you free"

A 93-year-old man dubbed the “accountant of Auschwitz” will go on trial in April on allegations he was accessory to 300,000 murders as an SS guard at the Nazis’ death camp, a German court said Monday.

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The German defendant, Oskar Groening, will face charges over the 425,000 people believed to have been deported to the camp in occupied Poland between May and July 1944, at least 300,000 of whom were killed in the gas chambers.

The regional court in the northern city of Lueneburg said the trial, expected to be one of the last of its kind, would start on April 21.

Groening has openly talked about his time as a guard, saying he witnessed atrocities but did not commit any himself.

Groening, then a member of the Nazi Waffen-SS, was tasked with counting the banknotes gathered from prisoners' luggage and passing them on to the SS authorities in Berlin, prosecutors in the northern city of Hanover said when he was charged in September.

For this reason, he was known as the "bookkeeper" of Auschwitz.

The accused also helped remove the luggage of victims so it was not seen by new arrivals, thus covering up the traces of mass killing, according to the prosecutors.

They said the defendant was aware that the predominantly Jewish prisoners deemed unfit to work "were murdered directly after their arrival in the gas chambers of Auschwitz".

In 2005, Groening told German daily Bild that he regretted working at the camp, saying he still heard the screams from the gas chamber decades later.

"I was ashamed for decades and I am still ashamed today," he was quoted as saying.

"Not of my acts, because I never killed anyone. But I offered my aid. I was a cog in the killing machine that eliminated millions of innocent people."

The suspect is one of around 30 former Auschwitz guards against whom federal investigators in 2013 recommended that state prosecutors pursue charges.

About 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, operated by the Nazis from 1940 until it was liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.

More than 50 Holocaust survivors or victims’ families have joined the case as co-plaintiffs and many are expected to attend Groening’s trial.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP)



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