Ewa Malcher
Oskar Groening, a former book-keeper at the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in occupied Poland, has been given a four-year prison sentence.
The 94-year old SS-man admitted to assisting in the murder of at least 300,000 people.
The three-month trial in Lüneburg saw Groening admitting to moral co-responsibility for the crime and pleaded with the victims of the Holocaust for forgiveness. He admitted that he had known about the crimes being committed at the camp.
In what is likely to be one of the last big Holocaust trials, the court heard that Groening had not killed anyone himself while working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, but prosecutors argued that his job, which involved sorting bank notes from trainloads of arriving Jews, that he supported a regime that was responsible for mass murder.
Groening, who was 21 and – he said - an “enthusiastic Nazi” when he was sent to work at the camp in 1942, was responsible for inspecting people’s luggage, removing and counting any bank notes that were inside and sending them on to SS offices in Berlin.
The charges relate to the period May to July 1944 when 137 trains carrying about 425,000 Jews from Hungary arrived at the camp. At least 300,000 of them were sent straight to the gas chambers, the indictment said. (jh)
Source: PAP, The Guardian
