A 93-year-old man who was assigned to confiscate the luggage of prisoners arriving at Auschwitz concentration camp in his capacity as an SS guard has gone on trial in Germany , charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Holocaust victims.

Oskar Gröning, referred to as ‘the accountant of Auschwitz’, is standing trial in the north German town of Lüneburg in what is a hugely symbolic act as part of authorities’ last-ditch attempt to put the handful of remaining Nazi death camp guards in the dock before they die.

Only 43 of the 6,500 SS members who worked in the concentration camps have ever faced prosecution. Of those only 25 went to prison and the rest were acquitted.

Unusually, Gröning has been quite outspoken about the two years he spent in Auschwitz, describing in an autobiography as well as lengthy interviews, some of the horrors he witnessed, and admitting that the events have haunted him his entire life. He admitted knowing about the gas chambers. But he has only ever described himself as a “small cog in the machine” and has repeatedly claimed his innocence.

On Monday some of around 60 joint plaintiffs who are due to give evidence, expressed their wish that the former bank clerk, who volunteered for the SS as a 20-year-old, will use the trial to admit to having been more than just a passive witness to some of the worst crimes committed against humanity.

“I would like him to acknowledge in front of the court that he realises what it means that he was even in Auschwitz in the first place, let alone that he probably took the luggage from some of the 49 members of my family who were murdered there,” said 90-year-old Eva Fahidi from Budapest who was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager, and last saw her mother and 11-year-old sister on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. “I am very interested to hear what he has to say, and whether he admits that he helped support the death machinery,” she said.

Hedy Bohm, 86, who was born in Romania and was deported to Auschwitz with her parents – both of whom were murdered there – travelled from her home in Toronto for the trial. She said she hoped a precendent would be set by the fact the trial is taking place at all.

“Whether you’re a bookkeeper, a supplier, a driver, a cook, whatever you are, if what you’re doing helps the machinery of death of a regime to keep rolling, you should be called to account. No one should ever be allowed to say ‘I was just a small cog in the machine’,” she said.

The Gröning prosecution was set in motion following the conviction of the Ukrainian-born death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2012 who the judge ruled had been an accessory to murder simply by working at the camp. With a new zeal and based on evidence gathered by the Central Office for National Socialist Crime in Ludwigsburg, prosecutors last year launched a nationwide hunt for remaining camp guards, including cases opened and closed several times over the years due to a lack of political will.

They identified 30 former SS members. Deaths and ill health have prevented the prosecution of most of them, but three of them, including Gröning, are now being brought to justice.

Prosecutors have concentrated the charge on the period between May and July 1944, the time of the mass deportation of Hungary’s Jewish community to Auschwitz when 137 trains brought 425,000 people to Auschwitz, of whom at least 300,000 were exterminated.

Gröning worked in the prisoner property administration – responsible for removing the luggage of passengers left on the unloading ramps – after they had been ‘selected’ into groups of who was going to the gas chambers and who was being sent to slave labour. The belongings were supposed to be removed as quickly as possible, so that newcomers to the camp would not suspect the fate that was about to befall them. At that time, with the end of war nearing, the aim was to murder as many prisoners in as short a time as possible and as a result the camp was operating day and night without a break.

Gröning, a trained bank clerk, was also responsible for counting the money found in the prisoners’ belongings and couriering it, sometimes personally, to the Reich security head office in Berlin, hence his nickname, ‘the accountant of Auschwitz’.

A report by his seniors on his working performance from 17 October 1944, reads that he had a “flawless character” with a “soldierly appearance that is always solid and correct” and a “reliable world view”.

In a BBC documentary a decade ago – while declining to admit his own guilt – Gröning said that he saw it as his responsibility to speak out against Holocaust deniers.

Gröning said: “I see it as my task, now at my age, to face up to these things that I experienced and to oppose the Holocaust deniers who claim that Auschwitz never happened ... I want to tell those deniers I have seen the gas chambers, I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the burning pits – and I want you to believe me that these atrocities happened. I was there.”

After the war he made a career for himself in a health insurance company, rising to the position of manager.

Hans Holtermann, Gröning’s lawyer, has said that his client will use the opportunity in Lüneburg to speak – unlike Demjanjuk who remained silent throughout his trial.

He said it would be in Gröning’s favour that he has given evidence against fellow SS members in other trials, that he has not tried to hide details of his role and that he applied to be transferred from Auschwitz on three occasions.

The third application was successful. He spent the last months of the war taking part in the Ardenne offensive against the allies, where he was wounded. He was then taken prisoner by the British until 1948.

Thomas Walther, the lawyer for the co-plaintiffs who has spent years trying to bring the case, said the law had not changed, rather the attitude of the justice system in the way it should be applied. He said: “Over the years many investigations have fallen by the wayside because it has always been said: ‘He’s too small a fish, we haven’t got time’ or: ‘What he did was redundant’, or: ‘He didn’t kill himself’.

“It has meant that many survivors have been living with the pain for 70 years of knowing that perpetrators have got away with the excuse of saying: ‘I was only following orders’. With this trial they have the chance to retrieve some of their dignity and to have a voice on behalf of their relatives, because they are finally being taken seriously by the German justice system.”

Judith Kalmann, 61, from Toronto, who is due to give evidence in late April, said: “For those who say it’s too little too late, I’d say it’s certainly better late than never. It’s very healing to get this recognition for my father, who lost 120 members of his family through the Holocaust, 30 of them in Auschwitz.”

Christophe Heubner, a German writer and the vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee who will follow the trial which is expected to last until July, said the court proceedings would go some way to address a historical wrong, but did little to rectify the fact the many top Nazis had escaped justice.

Heubner said: “The open wounds caused by the non-existent justice system is an enduring scandal that has lasted since Auschwitz until today and caused huge indignation amongst the survivors. The fact that most perpetrators died without seeing the inside of a courtroom, with most of them continuing to live in the middle of society without being confronted with their guilt, is not something we can change.

“But it’s very important that these survivors can testify as witnesses now.”

The last Nazis

Former SS members Hubert Z, a 94-year-old farmer from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and 93-year-old Reinhold H, from North Rhine-Westphalia (their full names cannot be given for legal reasons) are to stand trial following investigations by state prosecutors in Schwerin and Dortmund respectively. Each stands accused of acting as an accessory to the murder of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners. Just as in the Gröning case, the men are accused of assisting the Nazi killing machine by serving the SS. Like Gröning, neither of them are known to have directly killed, but they were in the camp when at least 1.1 million Jewish people, as well as tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Sinti and Roma, were exterminated.

Hubert Z arrived at Auschwitz in 1943 and worked as a hospital orderly in the emergency medical services squadron of the SS, having joined the organisation voluntarily, at the age of 20. Having previously served at the front, he was granted a transfer to the less dangerous location of Auschwitz because all his brothers had been killed in action. In his capacity as a medic, he helped to “support the industrial scale mass killings” carried out at Auschwitz, according to the Schwerin state prosecutor’s charge sheet. Hubert Z denies the charges, saying he had no contact with prisoners, only members of the SS in need of medical attention.



Reinhold H was a guard in the main camp, and was a member of the SS Totenkopf division. He was responsible for overseeing the selection process of prisoners immediately following their arrivial to Auschwitz, according to the prosecutor. He stands accused of acting as an accessory to the murder of 170,000 prisoners.



State prosecutors said in February that they have opened an investigation into 93-year-old Hilde Michnia who served as a guard in the Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen concentration camps and is suspected of forcing prisoners on an evacuation march in 1945 during which around 1,400 women died. A social worker from Lüneburg filed charges against her after seeing the Irish documentary Close to Evil in which an Irish survivor of Bergen-Belsen tries to meet her. Like Gröning, Michnia has done nothing to hide her past.

