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Auschwitz bookkeeper admits "moral guilt" at Holocaust trial
My personal take on this is that if you were a Nazi SS serving at a labor/death camp, then you are indeed complicit in any deaths/murders that occurred there. Probably, his advanced age and the accepted moral guilt of this defendant will mitigate his sentence if found guilty.4/21/2015
LUENEBURG, Germany (Reuters) - A 93-year-old former bookkeeper at Auschwitz who is accused of being an accessory to mass murder 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 the last big Holocaust trials, is accused of assisting in the murder of 300,000 people although he did not kill anyone himself.
"In moral terms, my actions make me guilty," Groening told the court in the northern town of Lueneburg at the start of the trial. "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.
His 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.
The charges against Groening relate to the period between May and July 1944 when 137 trains carrying roughly 425,000 Jews from Hungary arrived in Auschwitz. At least 300,000 of them were sent straight to the gas chambers, the indictment says.
Groening described some of the murders that he witnessed at Auschwitz. On his first day on the ramp where Jewish prisoners exited the trains, he saw an SS colleague grab a crying baby and slam its head against a truck until it was quiet. "I was so shaken. I don't find what he did good at all," Groening said, telling the court that he later went to his commander to request a transfer from Auschwitz.
He also told of an incident in late 1942 when he witnessed naked Jews being herded into a converted farm house near the camp. A fellow officer shut the door, put on a gas mask, opened a can and poured its contents down a hatch. The screams became louder and more desperate but after a short time they became quieter again," Groening said. "This is the only time I participated in a gassing," he added, before correcting himself: "I don't mean participated, I mean observed."