Verdict due in German trial of ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’

LUENEBURG, Germany (AFP) — A verdict is due Wednesday in the case of a former SS officer known as the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz, expected to be one of the last German trials of its kind.

A court in the northern city of Lueneburg, which has been hearing the case since April, is to read out its judgement on 94-year-old Oskar Groening from 7:30 a.m. GMT (10:30 a.m. in Israel).

As the proceedings wrapped up on Tuesday with the defense calling for an acquittal, Groening seized a last opportunity to address the judges and said he was “very sorry” for his time stationed at the Nazi death camp.

“No one should have taken part in Auschwitz,” he said.

“I know that. I sincerely regret not having lived up to this realization earlier and more consistently. I am very sorry,” he said, his voice wavering.

Groening stands accused of 300,000 counts of accessory to murder in the cases of deported Hungarian Jews sent to the gas chambers between May and July 1944.

If convicted, he could be sentenced to between three and 15 years.

However, few observers expect he would serve jail time given his advanced age and failing health, which led to several delays in the proceedings.

Groening served as a bookkeeper at Auschwitz, sorting and counting the money taken from those killed or used as slave labor, collecting cash in different European currencies, and shipping it back to his Nazi bosses in Berlin.

He testified in April and again this month that he was so horrified by the crimes he witnessed at the camp after his arrival in 1942 that he appealed three times to his superiors for a transfer to the front, which was not granted until Autumn 1944.

Groening has acknowledged “moral guilt” but said it is up to the court to rule on his legal culpability seven decades after the Holocaust.

Last week public prosecutors said they were seeking three and a half years’ jail for Groening based on the “nearly incomprehensible number of victims,” but mitigated by “the limited contribution of the accused” to their deaths.

They charge that on at least three occasions, Groening performed “ramp duty,” processing deportees as they arrived in cattle cars at the extermination and forced labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

By keeping the confiscated belongings of the previous arrivals out of the sight of the new prisoners, state attorneys argued, he averted panic breaking out and facilitated the smoother operation of Auschwitz’s killing machine.

However one of Groening’s two defense attorneys, Hans Holtermann, argued Tuesday that the state had failed to prove that he “aided and abetted a crime”.

“Mr. Groening was never an accessory to the Holocaust, neither with his presence at the ramp nor by transferring and counting money nor with any other actions, at least not in any legal sense,” he said.

Groening’s defense team asked the judges to take into account his deteriorating health but also his willingness to testify in detail about his time in Auschwitz, which many defendants in similar cases had refused to do.

The court heard harrowing testimony by more than a dozen Holocaust survivors, who are also co-plaintiffs in the case.

While some of the elderly witnesses expressed disappointment that Groening failed to formally apologize to them, others have spoken of a kind of catharsis from having their day in court.

“When I leave Lueneburg, I will have made my peace with any outcome,” Toronto-based survivor Hedy Bohm, 87, said last week.

Groening had previously been cleared by German authorities after lengthy criminal probes dating back to the 1970s.

But the legal foundation for prosecuting ex-Nazis changed in 2011 with the German trial of former death camp guard John Demjanjuk.

While previously courts had punished defendants for individual atrocities, Demjanjuk was convicted solely on the basis of having worked at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.

The head of the federal office investigating Nazi era crimes, Kurt Schrimm, told the Bild newspaper this month that other probes of former concentration camp guards were still ongoing, although “many had to be terminated because the accused had died or were no longer capable of standing trial.”

Some 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, perished between 1940 and 1945 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp before it was liberated by Soviet forces.