BERLIN — The trial of a 93-year-old man who was once a Waffen SS volunteer at Auschwitz highlights efforts by German prosecutors to tackle the country’s Nazi past in court.
Oskar Groening, whose job was to collect money taken from prisoners’ luggage after they arrived at the camp, will go on trial today in the northern city of Lueneburg on charges he aided in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
His role at the camp has been known for decades — he has talked about it in magazine and newspaper interviews — and a probe was dropped in 1985. But changes triggered by the 2011 conviction of former Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk prompted prosecutors to reopen the case.
“Unforgivable mistakes were made in the past: Way too many perpetrators, basically almost all, got away without being held responsible,” said Christoph Safferling, a criminal law professor at Erlangen University. “This was a birth defect of the Federal Republic of Germany. Where we now have chances to relook into these cases we should certainly do so.”
The trial comes as Germans are again revisiting the legacy of Adolf Hitler and the country’s Nazi past with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald concentration camps this month and the end of World War II in May. In a poll reported last week in Stern Magazine, 42 percent of Germans said they felt the country should draw closure on coming to terms with Hitler’s dictatorship.
Groening’s trial is the first in a renewed effort to target low-ranking Third Reich perpetrators. It follows the Demjanjuk case, which some lawyers say set aside the traditional requirement that prosecutors had to prove that workers in concentration camps had committed individual criminal acts to have personal responsibility for any atrocities.
The Munich judges in Demjanjuk’s trial said it was enough to show he served at the Sobibor camp to convict him. After that ruling, Germany’s central Nazi crime investigation unit probed about 50 Auschwitz guards and asked prosecutors to charge 30.
Groening is accused of aiding in the murder of at least 300,000 people from Hungary killed at Auschwitz in 1944.
His attorney, Hans Holtermann, said in an interview that Groening, who testified as a witness in other Nazi cases, never hid his actions and clearly regrets them. The question will be whether what he did was enough to make him an accessory to mass murder, he said.
