Germany charges 93-year-old for Murdering 300,000
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Germany charges 93-year-old former Auschwitz guard with accessory to 300,000 murders
BERLIN — German prosecutors say they’ve charged a 93-year-old man with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.
The charges against Oskar Groening come as part of a nationwide push against former Auschwitz guards launched last year.
Unlike most of the others, Groening has openly talked about his time as a guard and says while he witnessed horrific atrocities, he didn’t commit any crimes himself.
But Hannover prosecutors said in a statement Monday he was a cog in the machinery of destruction during his time at Auschwitz in 1944, noting that he helped collect and tally money stolen from murdered inmates.
The man disposed of the luggage of new prisoners left on train tracks at the concentration camp, Sabine Stuenkel, spokeswoman for Hanover prosecutors, said in an e-mailed statement Monday.
The goal was to “hide traces of the mass murder for subsequent inmates,” Stuenkel said. “Above all, his task was to count banknotes taken from the luggage and transfer them to the SS’s economy and administration agency in Berlin.”
He knew the inmates who were selected upon arrival and classified as “not capable of working,” most of them Jews from Hungary, would be gassed, prosecutors claim.
The money he collected helped fund the Nazis and supported the systematic killings, Stuenkel said.
He thus “helped the Nazi regime benefit economically, and supported the systematic killings.”
His attorney couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Last year, Germany’s central Nazi crime investigation unit asked prosecutors around the country to investigate 30 former guards at Auschwitz. The unit started looking into additional suspects after John Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison in 2011 for aiding the Nazis in the murder of at least 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp.
The Demjanjuk verdict triggered a new wave of investigations after the judges veered from previous cases that required proof of individual acts. In Demjanjuk’s case, the court said it was enough to show he worked at the camp where everyone was involved in the mass killings.
Source: Nationalpost
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