Trial of Former Auschwitz Guard, 93, Opens in Germany

Alison Smale, New York Times

21 April 2015

LÜNEBURG, Germany — Seven decades after the liberation of Auschwitz, a 93-year-old former SS guard at the Nazi death camp shuffled into a German court on Tuesday to answer charges of complicity in the murder of 300,000 mostly Hungarian Jews in two months during the summer of 1944.

With Holocaust survivors watching in the stark courtroom, the former guard, Oskar Gröning, read a terrifying but startlingly clear account of his life, focusing on the autumn of 1942 to the autumn of 1944, when he served in the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

After an hour, Mr. Gröning, a widower who lives in this small town in northern Germany, turned to the judge and said: “It is beyond question that I am morally complicit. This moral guilt I acknowledge here, before the victims, with regret and humility.”

“As concerns guilt before the law,” he told Judge Franz Kompisch, “you must decide.”

He said that he was responsible for collecting cash belonging to prisoners, as state prosecutors have charged, but that he also witnessed atrocities.

That included one night in December 1942 when he said he was rousted from bed to help hunt down fleeing prisoners. In the process, he told the court, he saw prisoners herded into a building and an SS superior tip gas out of a can into an opening. The screams of the prisoners inside “grew louder and more desperate, and after a short time became quieter and then stopped completely,” Mr. Gröning said.

“That was the only time I saw a complete gassing,” he said, emphasizing that “I did not take part.”

Reading his account with occasional guidance from his two lawyers, Mr. Gröning recalled heavy drinking with other guards and other minute details of his SS life, down to being told of the assignment to Auschwitz.

It was presented, he said, as a “duty that will demand more from you than the front” but was vital “to achieving the Final Solution” of eliminating Jews.

In November 1942, he recalled, a crying baby was found amid trash discarded by prisoners. The baby had evidently been abandoned by its prisoner mother in hopes she would not be sent to the gas chambers. A fellow SS member, angered by the cries, beat the infant to death, Mr. Gröning said, adding that he complained to a superior but no action was taken.

His case revives searing questions about individual guilt for Nazi atrocities and highlights the failure of the German justice system to prosecute those who served at the camp, where an estimated 1.1 million prisoners were killed. About 6,500 SS members worked at the camp; only 49 have been convicted of war crimes.

It also illustrates how perceptions of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes have shifted over the decades. Back in 1945, Lüneburg, then in the British sector of Allied-occupied Germany, was the site of one of the first trials of former guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eleven of the 32 on trial were executed in December that year.

But retribution swiftly gave way to the need to rebuild Germany. The crimes committed at Auschwitz were at the heart of four big trials in Frankfurt in the 1960s. Then, for decades, little happened as German prosecutors insisted that evidence had to tie those accused of war crimes directly to Holocaust atrocities.

Mr. Gröning’s prosecution became possible only through the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who emigrated to the United States after World War II. He was eventually sentenced in 2011 in Munich to five years in prison for his involvement in the killing of 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He died in 2012 before his appeal could be heard.

For decades until that ruling, prosecutors in Germany had declined to charge anyone with complicity in the Holocaust.

One of the men who helped pioneer the shift in German legal thinking was Thomas Walther, a lawyer who went to work in 2006 for Germany’s central office for tracking Nazi war crimes, based in Ludwigsburg.

He pursued the Demjanjuk case and is considered central to the subsequent trial and sentencing of Mr. Demanjuk, a former autoworker in Ohio.

In Lüneburg, Mr. Walther is representing 31 of the 53 co-plaintiffs, some of whom arrived here in recent days, ready to appear as witnesses once the formal charges against Mr. Gröning have been read.

Among them is Eva Fahidi, 90, a Hungarian Jew who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust, including her mother and younger sister, whom she last saw on the arrival ramp at Auschwitz. She said in an interview this year that, belated as German justice is, it was important to see someone sentenced for the crime.

Another co-plaintiff, Hedy Bohm, in her 80s, arrived from Toronto to bear witness. She was sent to Auschwitz at 16 and was immediately separated from her parents, who she believes were gassed. Like Ms. Fahidi, she is being represented by Mr. Walther.

“I see this trial as a small success, just a little door which is now open,” Mr. Walther said in a pretrial interview. It is vindication, he added, after “all the years in which the system nurtured the culture of justice simply turning a blind eye.”

Mr. Gröning gave two long interviews about a decade ago — to the BBCand to the newsmagazine Der Spiegel — in which he made clear that he had understood the murderous nature of Auschwitz-Birkenau but insisted that he was not guilty or responsible.

“Guilt is always connected to deeds,” he told Der Spiegel. “And since I think that I became a nonactive guilty party, I also think I am not guilty.”

So if he was not a perpetrator, was he an accomplice, the Spiegel interviewer, Matthias Geyer, asked.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Gröning replied. “An accomplice would be almost too much for me. I would describe it as a ‘small cog in the gears.’ If you can want to call that guilt, then I am involuntarily guilty. Legally speaking, I am not guilty.”

According to Der Spiegel, Mr. Gröning first described his experience at Auschwitz in the mid-1980s after a fellow member in a stamp-collecting club denied that the Holocaust had happened. The letter he wrote, detailing the gassing and other atrocities, was eventually published in a neo-Nazi magazine.

Mr. Gröning then typed out 87 pages, had them bound, and gave the volumes to his two sons, Der Spiegel said. Later, more copies were made.

The charges brought against Mr. Gröning resulted from research done into the cases of about 30 former camp guards after Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011.

94-year-old man in Schwerin, Germany, may also face trial in the coming months. Prosecutors there charged him in February with complicity in 3,681 murders at Auschwitz from mid-August 1944 to mid-September 1944.

In announcing the charges in February against the man, Hubert Zafke, the prosecutors said that among the 14 transport trains that arrived at Auschwitz during that time was one from the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands.

Research suggests, the prosecutors said, that among those aboard was Anne Frank and her family. Ms. Frank, whose diary became famous after World War II, was later deported from Auschwitz to the death camp at Bergen-Belsen, where she is believed to have died in 1945.

Featured Image: Oskar Gröning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, during a break on the first day of his trial in Lüneburg, Germany, on Tuesday. Copyright: Markus Schreiber/Associated Press

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