German court sentences 94-year-old to four years in prison after finding him guilty of being accessory to murder of 300,000 people

A 94-year-old German who worked as a bookkeeper at the Auschwitz death camp has been convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people and sentenced to four years in prison, in what could be one of the last big Holocaust trials.

Oskar Gröning did not kill anyone himself while working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the second world war, but prosecutors argued that by sorting the banknotes taken from the trainloads of arriving Jews he helped support a regime responsible for mass murder.

White-haired Gröning, who has been on trial since April, has admitted moral guilt but said it was up to the court to decide whether he was legally guilty.

He said this month he could only ask God to forgive him as he was not entitled to ask this of victims of the Holocaust.

The trial went to the heart of the question of whether people who were small cogs in the Nazi machinery, but did not actively participate in the killing of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, were guilty of crimes. Until recently, the answer from the German justice system was no.

During his time at Auschwitz, Gröning’s job was to collect the belongings of the deportees after they arrived by train and had been put through a selection process that resulted in many being sent directly to the gas chambers.

Gröning, who was 21 and by his own admission an enthusiastic Nazi when he was sent to work at the camp in 1942, inspected people’s luggage, removing and counting any banknotes that were inside and sending them on to SS offices in Berlin, where they helped to fund the Nazi war effort.

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

During that period guards worked around the clock as the trains rolled in, sometimes several at once, to ensure as many Jews were murdered as possible as the war began drawing to a close.



Many Germans are keen to draw a line under the Holocaust and seal the postwar democratic identity of their nation. Some find distasteful the pursuit of old men, often in poor health, for crimes committed nearly 70 years ago.



Gröning, who uses a walking frame, is frail and in May the court decided to limit the time he spent in the courtroom to three hours a day in view of his health problems, which had led to delays.

Oskar Gröning trial: ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’ admits moral guilt Read more

In court in April, Gröning was pushed by a prosecutor to answer whether he knew what the SS stood for when he volunteered to join it. He replied: “It is hard to describe it to someone of your generation who was not there. It is simply inexplicable.”

As a young SS recruit, he recalled being assigned a special and secret task, and was called along with other young men to a marble-clad conference room in the heart of the Nazi power centre in Berlin to swear an oath of allegiance to the Third Reich.



“They told us that we had to sign up on the spot to certain obligations regarding tasks we would be given that would be unpleasant but that had to be done in order to ensure the final victory,” he said. But he insisted he had not known that Auschwitz was a death camp until after his arrival there in the autumn of 1942.

“I knew it was a place that I didn’t want to be, that made me scared, but I didn’t know why,” he said. On his first evening, he and the other SS newcomers had been plied with vodka by their superiors. It was revealed to them that Jews arriving at Auschwitz who were considered unsuitable for slave labour were “disposed of”.

“It completely shook me,” he said. “I had had five glasses of vodka and continued to think about it when I woke up next morning.” He claimed that a breakthrough moment when his “enthusiasm for Adolf” began to wane had come several weeks into his arrival when a crying baby was discovered hidden in one of the suitcases, most likely left by a mother who had hoped to prevent its death.

He witnessed an SS guard pick the baby out and smash it against a lorry. “It was the worst moment of any I had experienced,” he said. “The next day I went to see my head of department and told him I wanted out of the whole business. My precise formulation was: ‘If things like that are always happening here, what a shitty dump this is, and I want out.”

He succeeded in securing a transfer only after making his third application, he said in April.

The trial marks the second attempt to bring Gröning to court. An investigation that began in 1978 collapsed seven years later with prosecutors ruling that unless it could be proven that Gröning was directly responsible for the deaths of prisoners, he could not be put on trial. But since the 2012 conclusion of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Munich, in which judges ruled he was an accessory to mass murder simply by working at the Sobibor extermination camp, a change of practice has taken place, in which an individual’s mere presence at a concentration camp coupled with the knowledge they knew what was happening there, is sufficient to secure a conviction.

