As Auschwitz arrivals drew their last breaths in gas chambers, the 21 year-old SS officer Oskar Gröning plundered their suitcases for valuables.
Yesterday the frail 93-year-old widower dubbed the “Auschwitz bookkeeper” shuffled into a German courtroom and, to camp survivors and Holocaust victims’ families, apologised for his role in the Nazi killing machine.
“There is no question for me that I have made myself morally culpable ... I stand before the victims with remorse and humility and ask for forgiveness,” said Mr Gröning in a statement to Lüneburg district court. Wearing a beige vest over a white shirt, he told the judge: “As for the question of criminal guilt, you have to decide.”
From September 1942 to October 1944 Mr Gröning stood at the train ramp in Auschwitz where more than one million arrivals left their suitcases, never to reclaim them. He noted all money and other valuables he found inside and forwarded them to Berlin, ensuring that one wave of Holocaust victims financed the next.
Jens Lehmann, a lawyer for Auschwitz survivors who are joint plaintiffs, said Mr Gröning did not contribute directly to killings but "gave the Nazi regime an economic boost" to continue its murderous campaign.
The trial in the northwest city of Lüneburg is one in a belated series of cases against junior Nazi officers since German prosecutors widened their focus to investigate and press charges against those not involved directly in killings.
Mr Gröning faces charges of being an accessory to murder in the case of 300,000 Hungarian Jews murdered on arrival at Auschwitz from May to July 1944. The 93-year-old sees himself as a “small cog” in the fascist machinery and said yesterday he was not involved in the killing of prisoners.
Unlike other ex-SS men Mr Gröning has made no secret of his past but until now German prosecutors showed little interest in him.
A decade ago he told Der Spiegel magazine that he had felt "nothing" when, as an enthusiastic young SS officer, he saw Jews being herded towards the Auschwitz gas chambers.
“If you’re convinced that the destruction of Judaism is necessary, then it no longer matters how the killing takes place,” he told the magazine.
He said yesterday he asked for a transfer after his first day in Auschwitz when a fellow SS officer slammed the head of a crying baby against a truck until the baby fell silent.
Judge Franz Kompisch told the court, and in particular the Auschwitz survivors present, that the testimony would "attract and generate a lot of emotion".
In court yesterday, Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor praised him for not hiding in shadows "like thousands of other Nazis".
“Few had the courage to step forward,” she said.
Another survivor, Eva Pusztai-Fahidi, who lost all 49 family members in Auschwitz, said: “It’s not about the punishment but the verdict.”
Of the estimated 6,000 SS officers who served in Auschwitz, only 800 ever appeared in court; in Germany: 40.
