A 93-year-old former bookkeeper at Auschwitz who is accused of assisting in the mass murder of Jews told a German court that he felt morally guilty for his work at the Nazi death camp, describing in detail the grisly killings he had witnessed there.
Oskar Groening, in what could be one of Germany’s last big Holocaust trials, is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people although in his role as a clerk he did not kill anyone himself.
“In moral terms, my actions make me guilty,” Groening said on the first day of his trial in the northern town of Lueneburg.
“I stand before the victims with remorse and humility,” he said. “On the question of whether I am guilty in legal terms, you must decide.”
Groening was 21, and by his own admission an enthusiastic Nazi, when he was sent to work at Auschwitz in 1942. His case is unusual because unlike many of the other SS men and women who worked in concentration camps, he has spoken openly in interviews about his time at the camp in occupied Poland.
Wearing a sleeveless beige sweater over a white shirt, the white-haired Groening appeared calm and composed, leaning back in his chair and looking at papers as prosecutors read out the indictment, which included graphic descriptions of how Jews were exterminated.
He laughed after his lawyer asked the judge to speak louder so that Groening could hear. At one point, taking a sip of water, he joked: “I’ll do that like I drank the vodka at Auschwitz.”
Groening’s job was to collect the belongings of deportees after they arrived at the camp by train and had been put through a selection process that resulted in many being sent directly to the gas chambers.
He inspected their luggage, removing and counting any bank notes that were inside, and sending them on to SS offices in Berlin, where they helped to fund the Nazi war effort. “By sorting the bank notes he helped the Nazi regime to benefit economically,” said Jens Lehmann, a lawyer for a group of Auschwitz survivors and relatives of victims who are joint plaintiffs in the case.
The trial has attracted major media interest, drawing dozens of reporters from outside of Germany.
Auschwitz survivors, who are plaintiffs in the case, travelled from the US, Canada, Hungary and elsewhere. Among them was Eva Mozes Kor, 81, who along with her twin sister, Miriam, was subject to human experiments by Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’. Her parents and two older sisters died in the camp.
“It didn’t stop with the end of Hitler,” she said of the intense emotional pain. “You couldn’t just turn off a button and start a new life.”