Laurence Rees is the author of Auschwitz: A New History, from which this article has been adapted.

Oskar Groening, at the age of 94, is currently on trial in Germany, charged with being an ‘accessory’ to several hundred thousand murders while he served as an SS officer at Auschwitz during World War II. On Wednesday, Groening, who admits moral guilt but denies that he ever committed a crime, as he didn’t personally kill any of the prisoners, was sentenced to four years in prison.

I first met Groening just over 11 years ago in a Hamburg hotel. He had agreed—after a great deal of persuading—to give an interview for the BBC/PBS documentary series ‘Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution,’ that I wrote and produced. I was, frankly, astonished that he had consented to take part in the series. Never before, to my knowledge, had a member of the SS from Auschwitz ever agreed to appear on camera. I was even more surprised by what he had to say. Here is an extract from his testimony, as I recorded it in my 2006 book Auschwitz: a New History .


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In 1942, when he was twenty-one years old, Oskar Groening was posted to Auschwitz. He almost immediately witnessed a transport arriving at “the ramp”—the platform where the Jews disembarked. “I was standing at the ramp,” he says, “and my task was to be part of the group supervising the luggage from an incoming transport.” He watched while SS doctors first separated men from women and children, and then selected who was fit to work and who should be gassed immediately. “Sick people were lifted on to lorries,” says Groening. “Red Cross lorries—they always tried to create the impression that people had nothing to fear.”

He estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of those on the first transport he witnessed in September 1942 were selected to be murdered at once.

“This process [of selection] proceeded in a relatively orderly fashion but when it was over it was just like a fairground. There was a load of rubbish, and next to this rubbish were ill people, unable to walk, perhaps a child that had lost its mother, or perhaps during searching the train somebody had hidden—and these people were simply killed with a shot through the head. And the kind of way in which these people were treated brought me doubt and outrage. A child was simply pulled on the leg and thrown on a lorry … then when it cried like a sick chicken, they chucked it against the edge of the lorry. I couldn’t understand that an SS man would take a child and throw its head against the side of a lorry … or kill them by shooting them and then throw them on a lorry like a sack of wheat.”

Groening, according to his story, was so filled by “doubt and outrage” that he went to his superior officer and told him: “It’s impossible, I can’t work here any more. If it is necessary to exterminate the Jews, then at least it should be done within a certain framework.” His superior officer calmly listened to Groening’s complaints, reminded him of the SS oath of allegiance he had sworn and said that he should “forget” any idea of leaving Auschwitz. But he also offered hope—of a kind. He told Groening that the “excesses” he saw that night were an “exception,” and that he himself agreed that members of the SS should not participate in such “sadistic” events. Documents confirm that Groening subsequently put in for a transfer to the front, which was refused. So he carried on working at Auschwitz.

Significantly, Groening did not complain to his boss about the principle of murdering the Jews, merely its practical implementation. When he saw people in front of him who he knew were going to die within hours in the gas chambers, he says his feelings were “very ambiguous.” He says, “How do you feel when you’re in Russia, here’s a machine gun in front of you, and there’s a battalion of Russians coming running towards you and you have to pull the trigger and shoot as many as possible? I’m saying it on purpose like this because there’s always behind you the fact that the Jews are enemies who come from the inside of Germany. The propaganda had for us such an effect that you assumed that to exterminate them was basically something that happened in war. And to that extent a feeling of sympathy or empathy didn’t come up.”

When pressed for the reason why children were murdered, Groening replies: “The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them. The enemy is their growing up to become a Jew who could be dangerous.”

Clues as to how it was possible that Oskar Groening felt helpless women and children were “enemies” who had to face “extermination” can be found in his life before he was posted to Auschwitz. He was born in 1921 in Lower Saxony, son of a skilled textile worker. Groening’s father was a traditional conservative, “proud of what Germany had achieved.” One of Groening’s earliest memories is of looking at photographs of his grandfather, who served in an elite regiment of soldiers from the Duchy of Brunswick: “His position impressed me terribly when I was a boy—he was sitting on his horse and playing his trumpet. It was fascinating.”

After Germany’s defeat in World War I Groening’s father joined the right-wing Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet), one of the many ultra-nationalist organizations that flourished in the wake of what they proclaimed was the humiliating peace of Versailles. His father’s anger at the way Germany had been treated grew more intense as his personal circumstances became more strained—lacking capital, his textile business went bankrupt in 1929. In the early 1930s young Oskar joined the Stahlhelm’s youth organization, the Scharnhorst.

Nothing felt more natural for Oskar Groening, who was only 11 years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933, than to ease from the Stahlhelm’s Scharnhorst into the Hitler Youth. He adopted the values of his parents and judged that the Nazis “were the people who wanted the best for Germany and who did something about it.” As a member of the Hitler Youth he took part in the burning of books written by “Jews or others who were degenerate.” And he believed that, by doing so, he was helping rid Germany of an inappropriate, alien culture. At the same time, he thought National Socialism was demonstrably working on the economic front:

“Within six months [of the Nazis coming to power] the 5 million unemployed had vanished from the streets and so everybody had work. Then [in 1936] Hitler marched into the Rhineland [demilitarized under the terms of the Versailles treaty] and simply occupied it—nobody tried to stop him. We were terribly happy about this—my father opened a bottle of wine.”

In the meantime, young Oskar went to school. He eventually finished high in his final class and, at 17, began a traineeship as a bank clerk. Just a few months after he started work in the bank war was declared; eight out of the 20 clerks were immediately conscripted into the army and their places taken by young women. This meant that the remaining trainees such as Groening could “get jobs they would have never normally reached. For example, I had to take over the cash till.”

Despite this unexpected advance in their banking careers, as they heard news of Germany’s quick victories in Poland and France the trainees were filled with “euphoria” and a feeling that “you wanted to be part of it.” Oskar Groening wanted to join an “elite” unit of the German army, just as his grandfather had done. And for this young man only one unit fulfilled his dream: the Waffen SS, formed from a unit of the SA, the Nazi storm troopers, for those times “when it was important to have a unit you could absolutely rely on.”

So, without telling his father, Oskar went along to a hotel where the Waffen SS were recruiting and joined up. “And when I came home my father said, ‘I was hoping that because you were wearing glasses you wouldn’t be accepted.’ And then he said, ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll see what you’ll get out of this.’” Committed as his father was to the Nationalist cause, he was reluctant to see his son go to war.

What Oskar Groening got out of his membership of this elite corps was, initially, a job in SS administration as a bookkeeper. He was not at all displeased by this posting: “I’m a desk person. I wanted to work in a job that had both the soldier’s life and also the bureaucratic aspect.”

He worked as a bookkeeper for a year until September 1942, when the order came through that fit, healthy members of the SS working in salary administration centers were to be transferred to more challenging duties, with the administrative jobs reserved for returning veterans disabled at the front: “So, under the assumption that we would now enter a fighting unit, about 22 of us went with our luggage and got on a train to Berlin. It was very strange, because generally an order would have come for us to go to a troop-mustering place—but that didn’t happen.”

Groening and his comrades reported to one of the SS economic offices, located in a “beautiful building” in the capital. They were then directed to a conference room where they were addressed by several high-ranking SS officers.

“We were reminded that we had sworn an oath with the motto ‘My loyalty is my honor,’ and that we could prove this loyalty by doing this task which was now given to us—the details of which we would find out later. Then a subordinate SS leader said we were to keep absolutely silent about this task. It was top-secret, so that neither our relatives or friends or comrades or people who were not in the unit were to be told anything about it. So we had to march forward individually and sign a statement to this effect.”

Once in the courtyard of the building, Groening and his comrades were split into smaller groups, given their individual destinations, and then transported to various Berlin stations where they boarded trains. “We went south,” says Oskar Groening, “in the direction of Katowice. And our troop leader, who had the papers, said we had to report to the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. I’d never heard of Auschwitz before.”

Groening and his group arrived late in the evening and were directed by military police to the main camp, where they reported to the central administrative building and were allocated “provisional” bunks in the SS barracks. The other members of the SS they met in the barracks that night were friendly and welcoming. “We were accepted by the people who were there and they said, ‘Have you eaten anything yet?’ We hadn’t, and so they got us something.” Groening was surprised that in addition to the basic SS rations of bread and sausage there was also extra food available, consisting of tins of herring and sardines. Their new friends also had rum and vodka, which they put on the table and said, “Help yourself.”

“We did this, and so we were quite happy. We asked, ‘What kind of place is this?’ and they said we should find out for ourselves—that it’s a special kind of concentration camp. Suddenly, the door opened and somebody said, ‘Transport!’ which caused three or four people to jump up and vanish.

After a good night’s sleep, Groening reported once more with the other new arrivals to the central SS administrative building. They were quizzed by a number of senior SS officers about their background before the war. One of the officers said he could make use of Groening’s experience as a bank clerk, and took him to the barrack where prisoners’ money was kept.

So far Oskar Groening’s personal experience of Auschwitz was that it was a “normal” concentration camp for the detaining of political prisoners or other “enemies of the state,” albeit one where the rations for the SS members were particularly good. But, as he began his task of registering the prisoners’ money, he learned for the first time about the additional, “unusual” function of Auschwitz. “The people there [working in the barracks] let us know that this money didn’t all go back to the prisoners —Jews were taken to the camp who were treated differently. The money was taken off them without them getting it back.” Groening asked, “Is this to do with the ‘transport’ that arrived during the night?” His colleagues replied, “Well, don’t you know? That’s the way it is here. Jewish transports arrive, and as far as they’re not able to work they’re got rid of.” Groening pressed them on what “got rid of ” actually meant, and, having been told, says that his reaction was one of astonishment.

“It was a shock, that you cannot take in at the first moment. But you mustn’t forget that not only from 1933 [Hitler’s acquisition of power], but even from before that, the propaganda I got as a boy in the press, the media, the general society I lived in made us aware that the Jews were the cause of the First World War, and had also ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ at the end. And that the Jews were actually the cause of the misery in which Germany found herself. We were convinced by our worldview that there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness against us, and that thought was expressed in Auschwitz. … The enemies who are within Germany are being killed—exterminated if necessary. And between these two fights, openly at the front line and then on the home front, there’s absolutely no difference—so we exterminated nothing but enemies.”

Groening arrived at Auschwitz just as the Nazi extermination machine was settling into a ruthlessly efficient pace of destruction. By the summer of 1942, shortly before Groening arrived, Auschwitz was receiving transports of Jews from all over Europe, including Slovakia, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

After Groening had been working at Auschwitz for several months, his work, he says, had become “routine.” He sorted out the various currencies that had been taken from the new arrivals, counted the moneys and sent it to Berlin. He still attended selections, not to participate in the decision-making process about who should live and who should die—those decisions were made by SS doctors—but to ensure that the belongings of the Jews were taken away and held securely until they could be sorted. This was done in an area of the camp that came to be called “Canada,” because that country had become a fantasy destination—a land rich in everything.

Groening manufactured for himself what he considered to be a tolerable life at Auschwitz. In his office he was insulated from the brutality, and when he was walking around the camp he could avert his eyes from anything that displeased him. In normal circumstances he had nothing to do with the crude mechanics of the killing process—there was generally no reason for him to visit the remote corner of Birkenau where the murders took place. The only reminder that different nationalities were coming to the camp was the variety of currencies that crossed Groening’s desk—one day French francs, another Czech korunas, the next Polish zlotys (and always American dollars)—plus the array of liquor taken from the new arrivals—Greek ouzo, French brandy and Italian sambuca.

Says Groening, “We didn’t feel any empathy or sympathy towards one or other Jewish group from any particular country unless you were keen on getting a particular kind of vodka or schnapps—the Russians had a lovely type of vodka. … We drank a lot of vodka. We didn’t get drunk every day—but it did happen. We’d go to bed drunk, and if someone was too lazy to turn off the light they’d shoot at it—nobody said anything.”

Although Groening does not exactly use the word “enjoyable” to describe his time at Auschwitz, it is hard to see how that is not an apt description of the life he paints.

“Auschwitz main camp was like a small town. It had its gossip—it had a vegetable shop where you could buy bones to make broth. There was a canteen, a cinema, a theatre with regular performances. There was a sports club of which I was a member. There were dances—all fun and entertainment.”

And then there was the other “positive” side of life at Auschwitz for Oskar Groening—his comrades: “I have to say that many who worked there weren’t dull, they were intelligent.” When he eventually left the camp in 1944, he went with some regrets:

“I’d left a circle of friends who I’d got familiar with, I’d got fond of, and that was very difficult. Apart from the fact that there are pigs who fulfil their personal drives—there are such people—the special situation at Auschwitz led to friendships which, I still say today, I think back on with joy.”

But one night, towards the end of 1942, Groening’s comfortable life at Auschwitz was disrupted by a sudden glimpse into the nightmare of the actual killing operation. Asleep in his barracks in the SS camp on the perimeter of Birkenau, he and his comrades were woken by the sound of an alarm. They were told that a number of Jews who were being marched to the gas chambers had escaped and run to the nearby woods. “We were told to take our pistols and go through the forest,” says Groening. “We found no one.” Then he and his comrades spread out and moved up towards the extermination area of the camp.

“We went in star formation up towards this farmhouse—it was lit from outside in diffused light, and out in the front were seven or eight bodies. These were the ones who had probably tried to escape and they’d been caught and shot. In front of the door of the farmhouse were some SS men who told us, ‘It’s finished, you can go home.’”

Overcome by curiosity, Groening and his comrades decided not to “go home” but to hang about in the shadows instead. They watched as an SS man put on a gas mask and placed Zyklon B pellets through a hatch in the side of the cottage wall. There had been a humming noise coming from inside the cottage that now “turned to screaming” for a minute—followed by silence. “Then one man—I don’t know whether he was an officer—stood and came to the door where there was a peep-hole, looked in and checked whether everything was OK and the people were dead.” Groening describes his feelings at this moment, when the crude mechanics of murder were placed in front of him, “as if you see two lorries crashing on the motorway. And you ask yourself, ‘Must it be that way? Is this necessary?’ And of course it’s influenced by the fact that you said before, ‘Yes, well, it’s war,’ and we said, ‘They were our enemies.’”

To meet Oskar Groening today, and listen to his attempt to explain his time at Auschwitz, is a strange experience. Now in his 80s, he talks almost as if there was another Oskar Groening who worked at Auschwitz 60 years ago—and about that “other” Groening he can be brutally honest. He shields himself from taking full responsibility for playing a part in the extermination process by constantly referring to the power of the propaganda to which he was exposed, and the effect on him of the ultra-nationalistic family atmosphere in which he grew up. Only after the war, once he was exposed to another worldview—one that questioned the Nazis’ assumptions about the “international Jewish conspiracy” and the role of the Jews in World War I—was the “new” Oskar Groening able to emerge, fit to face life as a useful citizen in the modern, democratic Germany.

This is not to say that Groening attempts to hide behind the “acting under orders” defense. He does not present himself as a mindless automaton who would have followed any command given to him. When the suggestion is put to him that he would have accepted Aryan children being murdered at Auschwitz, he rejects it absolutely. He makes a lie of the notion, prevalent among some historians, that the SS men were so brutalized by their training that they would have killed anyone they were asked to. No, Groening’s decision-making process operated at a much less simplistic level. Yes, he claims that he was massively influenced by the propaganda of the times, but during the war he nevertheless made a series of personal choices. He carried on working at Auschwitz not just because he was ordered to but because, having weighed the evidence put before him, he thought that the extermination program was right. Once the war was over he disputed the accuracy of the evidence put before him, but he did not claim that he acted as he did because he was some kind of robot. Throughout his life he believes he did what he thought was “right”; it’s just that what was “right” then turns out not to be “right” today.

We should not be unduly cynical about such a coping mechanism. Of course he could have chosen differently—he could have rejected the values of his community and resisted. He could have deserted from Auschwitz (although there is no record of any member of the SS doing so as a result of refusing on moral grounds to work in the camp). It would have taken an exceptional human being to act in such a way, however, and the essential—almost frightening—point about Oskar Groening is that he is one of the least exceptional human beings you are ever likely to meet.

A study of the historical-sociological profile of the SS in Auschwitz, based on statistical records, found that “the SS camp force was not exceptional in its occupation structure or in its levels of education. The camp staff was very much like the society from which it was drawn.” Oskar Groening perfectly illustrates this conclusion. He was also typical in that he was a rank-and-file member of the SS—the highest rank he attained was Rottenführer (corporal).

About 70 percent of SS men in Auschwitz fell into this category; 26 percent were non-commissioned officers (non-commissioned ranks above Rottenführer); and just 4 percent of the total SS complement were officers. There were around 3,000 members of the SS serving in Auschwitz I and the related sub-camps at any one time. The SS administration of the camp was divided into five main departments—the headquarters department (personnel, legal and other related functions), the medical unit (doctors and dentists), the political department (the Gestapo and the criminal police, the Kripo), the economic administration (including the registration and disposal of property stolen from the murdered prisoners), and the camp administration (responsible for security within the camp). By far, the biggest department was the last—about 75 percent of the SS members who worked at Auschwitz performed some kind of security function. Oskar Groening was unusual only in that he had a comparatively “easy” job as part of the economic administration.

Nevertheless, the sight of the gassing installations and the burning cremation pits that winter night in 1942 momentarily shattered the cozy, ordinary life that Oskar Groening had created for himself at Auschwitz. So much so that he went once more to his boss, an SS Untersturmführer (lieutenant) who was “an Austrian and basically an honest bloke” and poured out his feelings. “He listened to me and said: ‘My dear Groening, what do you want to do against it? We’re all in the same boat. We’ve given an obligation to accept this—not to even think about it.’” With the words of his superior officer ringing in his ears, Groening returned to work. He had sworn an oath of loyalty, he believed the Jews were Germany’s enemy, and he knew that he could still manipulate his life at the camp to avoid encountering the worst of the horror.

And so he stayed until 1944, when his application for a transfer to a front-line unit was finally granted, and he joined an SS unit that was fighting in the Ardennes. After being wounded and sent to a field hospital, he rejoined his unit before it eventually surrendered to the British on June 10, 1945. Groening became a prisoner of war.

While those who had endured Nazi persecution faced distinctly mixed fortunes after the conflict ended, their SS perpetrators knew with certainty from the moment of the German surrender that they were at risk of arrest and prosecution. Just as Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz’s commandant who built the gas chambers and crematoria that made the camp famous, sought to conceal his past before he was captured by the British and hanged in 1947, Groening, a minor cog in the Auschwitz machine, tried to do the same.

Once the SS members were in captivity, the British handed questionnaires to all of them. Groening wrote on the form that he had worked for the SS Economic and Administration office in Berlin. He did this not because he was suddenly overcome with a sense of shame about what had happened at Auschwitz, but because “the victor’s always right and we knew that the things that happened there [in Auschwitz] did not always comply with human rights.”

Along with the rest of his SS comrades, Groening was imprisoned in an old Nazi concentration camp, which was “not very pleasant—that was revenge against the guilty.” But life improved when he was shipped to England in 1946. Here, as a forced laborer, he had “a very comfortable life.” He ate good food and earned money to spend. He became a member of the YMCA choir and for four months traveled through the Midlands and Scotland giving concerts. He sang German hymns and traditional English folk songs such as “A lover and his lass” to appreciative British audiences who competed to have one of the Germans stay with them overnight and give him a good night’s sleep and breakfast.

When he was finally released and returned to Germany in 1947, he found that he could not regain his old job at the bank because he had been a member of the SS, so he got a job in a glass factory and began the long climb up the management ladder. He continued his policy of trying not to draw “undue attention” to his time in Auschwitz, so much so that he insisted that his close family erase their memories as well.

Once, shortly after his return to Germany, he was sitting at the dinner table with his father and his parents-in-law and “they made a silly remark about Auschwitz,” implying that he was a “potential or real murderer.” “I exploded!” says Groening. “I banged my fist on the table and said, ‘This word and this connection are never, ever, to be mentioned again in my presence, otherwise I’ll move out!’ I was quite loud, and this was respected and it was never mentioned again.” Thus did the Groening family settle back and begin to make a future for itself in post-war Germany, enjoying the fruits of the German “economic miracle.”

As Groening forced himself and his family to forget the atrocities at Auschwitz, it seemed for a time that the world was doing the same. It would take years for the site of the atrocities at Auschwitz to be appropriately maintained and cared for. Indeed, not until well after the fall of Communism would the signage at the museum finally be changed to reflect in a proper manner the suffering of the Jews.

In the meantime, Groening steadily rose through the management structure of the glass factory where he now worked, eventually becoming head of personnel. Finally, he was made an honorary judge of industrial tribunal cases. Without seeing any sense of irony or inappropriateness in his words, Oskar Groening believes that the experience he gained in the SS and Hitler Youth helped him do his job as a personnel officer better, because “from the age of 12 onwards I learned about discipline.”

Even though he had worked at Auschwitz and helped in the extermination process by sorting and counting the foreign money stolen from the arriving transports, Groening never considered himself “guilty” of any crime. “We drew a line between those who were directly involved in the killing and those who were not directly involved.” Additionally, he felt he was—using the words of the infamous Nazi post-war defense—acting under orders, and he attempts to defend himself with this analogy: “The first time a company of soldiers gets a volley of machine gun fire they don’t all get up and say, ‘We don’t agree with this—we’re going home.’”

This was, perhaps surprisingly, a similar line to the one taken by West German prosecutors after the war as they sought to determine who from Auschwitz should face war crime charges and who should not. If a member of the SS was not either in a senior leadership position or directly involved in killing, he generally escaped prosecution. Thus, when Oskar Groening’s past was eventually uncovered—inevitably, because he never made any attempt to change his name and hide—the German prosecutors did not press charges against him. His experience therefore demonstrates how it is possible to have been a member of the SS, worked at Auschwitz, witnessed the extermination process, contributed to the “Final Solution” in a concrete way by sorting the stolen money and still not be thought “guilty” by the post-war West German state.

Indeed, out of the 6,500 or so members of the SS who worked at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and who are thought to have survived the war, fewer than 800 ever received punishment of any kind. The most notorious legal process was the “Auschwitz trial” in Frankfurt between December 1963 and August 1965, when, of the 22 defendants, 17 were convicted and only six received the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

However, it was not only Germany that failed to prosecute in substantial numbers those SS members who had worked at Auschwitz. This was a collective failure of the international community (with the possible exception of the Polish courts, who tried a remarkable 673 out of the 789 Auschwitz staff ever to face justice). Prosecutions were hindered, not just by lack of consistency between nations about what conduct constituted a “crime” in Auschwitz, but also by the division caused by the Cold War and—it must be said—by a clear lack of will.

Despite the Nuremberg trials stating that the SS was a “criminal” organization in its entirety, no attempt was ever made to enforce the view that the mere act of working in the SS at Auschwitz was a war crime—a view that popular opinion would surely have supported. A conviction and sentence—however minimal—for every SS man who was there would have sent a clear message for the future. It did not happen. About 85 percent of the SS members who served at Auschwitz and survived the war escaped scot-free. When Himmler began the development of the gas chambers in order to distance the SS men from the psychological “burden” of shooting people in cold blood, he could scarcely have predicted that it would have this additional benefit for the Nazis. This method of murder meant that the vast majority of the SS members who served at Auschwitz could escape punishment after the war by claiming to not have been directly involved in the extermination process.

Groening also feels no unease about the fact that, while many of those who were imprisoned in Auschwitz faced further hardship after they were liberated, he enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) a life of comfort. “It’s always like that in the world,” he says. “Each person has the freedom to make the best of the situation he’s in. I did what every normal person tries to do, which is to make the best possible situation for himself and his loved ones, if he has a family. So I succeeded in doing that—others didn’t succeed. What happened before is irrelevant.”

Open In New Window This article is an adapted excerpt from Laurence Rees' book, Auschwitz: A New History. (Click to buy the book.)

Given this attitude of insouciance, it is all the more surprising that, towards the end of his life, Oskar Groening decided to speak openly about his time in Auschwitz. The circumstances that led to his change of heart are intriguing. After the war, Groening became a keen stamp collector and was a member of his local philately club. At one of the meetings, more than 40 years after the war, he started to chat to the man next to him about politics. “Isn’t it terrible,” said the man, “that the present government says it’s illegal to say anything against the killing of millions of Jews in Auschwitz.” He went on to explain to Groening how it was “inconceivable” for so many bodies to have been burnt, and he also maintained that the volume of gas that was supposed to have been used would, in reality, have killed “all living beings” in the vicinity.

Groening said nothing to contradict these statements at the philately club, but later obtained one of the Holocaust deniers’ pamphlets that his fellow stamp collector had recommended, wrote his own ironic commentary on it and posted it to him. Then he suddenly started to receive odd phone calls at home from strangers who disputed his view that Auschwitz was really the center of mass killing by gassing. It turned out that his denunciation of the Holocaust deniers’ case had been printed in a neo-Nazi magazine. And now “90 percent” of the calls and anonymous letters he received “were all from people who tried to prove that what I had seen with my own eyes, what I had experienced in Auschwitz was a big, big mistake, a big hallucination on my part because it hadn’t happened.”

Motivated now by a desire to speak out against those who denied the sights he personally had witnessed, Groening wrote down his own personal history for his family and eventually agreed to be interviewed by the BBC. Now well into his 80s, Groening has one simple message for the Holocaust deniers: “I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematorium. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened, because I was there.”

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When I met Oskar Groening back in the early years of this new century, he felt there was little danger that he would ever be prosecuted. After all, the German authorities knew all about him and his involvement in Auschwitz—and yet had decided to leave him alone. But, a few years ago, after the trial of John Demjanjuk—who had worked as a guard in a concentration camp in occupied Poland during the war—the government’s attitude changed. During that trial German legal experts accepted that there could be a charge of “accessory” to murder in connection with the death camps, and so they started to consider prosecuting those like Groening who had previously escaped justice.

Whilst I believe that the testimony we gained from Oskar Groening is of immense historical value, and I am grateful to him for coming forward and not hiding in the shadows, I also think—as I said in my book—that he should have been prosecuted immediately after the war, along with every single other member of the SS at Auschwitz. It’s hard not to believe that his prosecution now is too little too late.

(This article has been updated to reflect the final results of Groening's trial.)