21 April 2015

Bookkeeper for the Holocaust


The BBC has an article about another Nazi, still alive:
A 93-year-old former Nazi SS guard, known as the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz, has admitted he is "morally" guilty. Oskar Groening (photo) spoke at the beginning of his trial for being an accessory to the murder of at least three hundred thousand Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
He described his role as that of counting money confiscated from new arrivals, and said he witnessed mass killings, but denied any direct role in the genocide. If found guilty, he could face three to fifteen years in prison.
Addressing the judges, Groening also said: "I ask for forgiveness. I share morally in the guilt, but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide.''
This is expected to be one of the final trials for Nazi war crimes. 
At the scene: Jenny Hill of BBC News, at the court in Lüneburg, Germany:
Oskar Groening looked frail as he entered the courtroom leaning on a walking frame. But his voice was strong and steady as he spoke for nearly an hour. Four survivors from the notorious death camp faced him across the room. Much of his testimony described his attempts to achieve his ambition of being an SS "executive", to work as a bookkeeper for the Nazis.
But there were haunting moments too; for a little while we saw the horrors of Auschwitz through his eyes.
The survivors watched him impassively, but their younger relatives shook their heads in disbelief as he recounted his arrival at the camp as a young SS guard. He'd been plied with vodka by officers there, he said. He even described the vodka bottles. As they drank, the officers told him that the camp was for deported Jews, and that those Jewish prisoners would be killed and disposed of.
Later, he pulled out a water bottle: "I'll drink from it like I drank from those vodka bottles in Auschwitz."
The nonagenarian only came to the attention of prosecutors following a decision to speak out against Holocaust deniers. "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."
Oskar Groening signed up to the Waffen SS and arrived in Auschwitz in 1942. Groening, who began work at Auschwitz at the age of 21, has always maintained that his role as a guard was not a crime. "If you can describe that as guilt, then I am guilty, but not voluntarily. Legally speaking, I am innocent," he told Der Spiegel in 2005.
Groening served at Auschwitz between May and June of 1944, when more than four hundred thousand Jews from Hungary were brought there, and at least three hundred thousand were almost immediately gassed to death.
Charges brought against him in the 1980s were dropped because of a lack of evidence of his personal involvement. However, following a recent ruling, prosecutors believe a conviction may be possible simply because he worked at the camp.
"What I hope to hear is that aiding in the killing machinery is going to be considered as a crime," Auschwitz survivor Hedy Bohm told the Reuters news agency. "So then no one in the future can do what he did and claim innocence."
Rico says too bad they can't kill him...

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