German court convicts ‘book-keeper of Auschwitz’

PanARMENIAN.Net - A German court has convicted a 94-year-old former guard at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews, BBC News reports.

Oskar Groening, known as the "book-keeper of Auschwitz", was sentenced to four years in prison. He was responsible for counting the belongings confiscated from prisoners and had admitted "moral guilt".

His lawyers said he did not facilitate genocide, but prosecutors argued that he had helped the camp run smoothly.

Many observers have questioned whether Groening will ultimately be sent to jail, given his advanced age. He is expected to be one of the last Nazis to face a courtroom.

The trial was held in the northern German city of Lueneburg. Delivering the verdict, Judge Franz Kompisch said Groening had willingly taken a "safe desk job" in a system that was "inhumane and all but unbearable for the human psyche".

The trial, which began earlier this year, heard evidence from several people who had survived the death camp. One of the survivors, Eva Kor, said she forgave Groening, and tweeted a picture of herself shaking his hand.

After the verdict, Leon Schwarzbaum, a survivor of Auschwitz, told AFP that he could not forgive Groening for the killing of his family members. He said he agreed with the judge's decision - but did not want to see Groening jailed.

"I am happy with the verdict, but I don't wish prison on him because I know what it's like to be in prison," he said. "I was in Auschwitz for two years."

A statement from a group of Holocaust survivors and victims' relatives said the pain of losing families at Auschwitz could not be alleviated by criminal proceedings or the words of the accused. "But it gives us satisfaction that now the perpetrators cannot evade prosecution as long as they live," the statement said.

The case revolved around the question of whether people who had played a minor role in the Nazi-ordered genocide but had not actively killed any Jews could still be guilty of a crime.

Cornelius Nestler, a lawyer for a group of plaintiffs, said the case demonstrated that Auschwitz as a whole was "a murder machinery".

"Everyone who participated in it has to take responsibility for it," he told Reuters.

Groening had publicly discussed his role at Auschwitz, making him unusual among former Nazis brought to trial. He said he was speaking out in order to silence those who deny the Holocaust took place.

"I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria," he told the BBC in the 2005 documentary Auschwitz: the Nazis and the "Final Solution".

"I was on the ramp when the selections [for the gas chambers] took place."

More than one million people, most of them European Jews, died between 1940 and 1945 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.