Speaking for the Dead

"I can speak about 300,000 dead people who are murdered, but nobody can imagine what that means -- such figures of death -- while the Holocaust, this word, it is a part of families."
"It is inside of human beings. It is something in the tears, if you wake up in the night and think about your father who was killed. That is the Holocaust. And in the second generation, in the children of survivors, those who suffer the nightmares and memories of their parents -- that is the Holocaust."
"Co-plaintiffs represent their murdered parents and siblings, and I represent the co-plaintiffs in court. And to be sure that I find the right words for them, the right feeling in a German courtroom, this is the reason I am here in Canada, interviewing them."
"My colleagues [German judges] in the past, these German prosecutors and judges, did things in the wrong way. You have to learn, and you learn it in the second term of law studies: what is aiding and abetting a crime."
Retired German judge Thomas Walther

Peter J. Thompson, National Post ... Retired German judge Thomas Walther in Toronto and Montreal interviewing Hungarian-Canadian Auschwitz survivors as co-plaintiffs in an effort to place former SS sergeant Oskar Groening behind bars.

"Guilt really has to do with actions. Because I believe that I was not an active perpetrator, I don't believe that I am guilty."
"I would describe my role as a small cog in the gears."
Oskar Groening, former SS officer, Auschwitz administrator

Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 26,1944

"They asked for a translator, and because I spoke Hungarian, German and Slovak, I put my hand up And I stood beside this officer telling the people that those able and capable to walk would walk [to our barracks], and the old people and children -- he would send by truck."
"We would all be together, at the end. I translated all this to Hungarian ladies, including my aunt, with her two little children, and my Grandma. The officer told the mothers not to fuss, if they wanted to stay with their children. And he put them all together, on the side that went straight to the gas."
"We did not know where those people had gone for the first ten days. And this was my arrival to Auschwitz. Oskar Groening didn't kill with his hands. But he was part of that killing machinery."
Judy Lysy, Holocaust survivor, 86, Toronto

Famous photo of Hungarian Jews walking to the gas chamber

Oskar Groening, perhaps unsurprisingly, proffered an explanation of his enabling services to the Third Reich in its campaign to destroy the plague of Jewry in Europe, by emphasizing his minuscule role as simply someone following orders. His an unimportant job in the larger perspective of the giant machinery set in motion to eradicate the presence of a single ethnic-religious group of people from all walks of life, all ages and health conditions, rich and poor, influential and unnoticed, gifted and ordinary.

Before him, Adolf Eichmann also gave that rather unconvincing picture of himself as an obedient servant of the state, guilty of nothing more than attention to duty. In the case of Oskar Groening, the "bookkeeper" of Auschwitz, at that time an SS sergeant whose duty it was to sort and count funds taken from the murdered Jews and couriering the funds to Berlin, someone who stood guard on the train platform in Auschwitz welcoming the cattle cars delivering doomed Jews, he was merely following orders.

At the time, he informed Der Spiegel magazine in 2005, it was his understanding that destroying Jews represented a "necessary thing". Which puts him in league with the 20% of Germans invited to respond to a survey conducted in the American occupied zone of Germany following the war, who stated their agreement with Hitler's plan for the extermination of Jews.  Within a period of 57 days in 1944, 3.5 Jews per minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week were murdered, in total 300,000 of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz.

Retired German judge Thomas Walther pledged himself to hunting down as many of those involved in enabling these atrocities as he could, and to bring them to the attention of the world, and to see justice done on behalf of the dead. At age 63 in 2006 he began his long journey to achieving justice for the dead, and to see that history recorded the truth as it happened. During the Kristallnacht riots of 1938 his father sheltered two Jewish families, teaching his son by example to do the right thing.

Mr. Groening, the former SS sergeant who acted as the point man for record-keeping and money-collection, has made his own amends with his conscience. Now a widower of 93 enjoying a comfortable well-earned pension, he managed a German glass factory after the war. He admits to having been at Auschwitz, speaking openly of his experiences. He did so to counter the denials, he claims, of Holocaust disbelievers, with the truthful memories of one who witnessed it.

He was, he now claims, a brainwashed zealot who believed the Nazi propaganda. And while he was involved in expediting the master plan of the Final Solution, he did not in fact, physically murder anyone. Such being the case he is innocent of any crime. "Groening will not deny anything" explained Mr. Walther. "He will only seek to diminish." But Judy Lysy is one of the Hungarian Jews living in Canada whom Mr. Walther sought out to interview, to gather evidence by which Mr. Groening will face justice.

It rankles retired justice Thomas Walther that of the 6,500 SS members who worked in Auschwitz, 49 of their number only were convicted of a crime. Many of the judges who did sit in judgment and the lawyers who defended those accused of war crimes themselves had Nazi pasts. Most Germans were unwilling and disinterested in revealing complicity in the Holocaust. It would do to sacrifice a few high-ranking officers to face the judgement of their crimes. That's what Nuremberg was for, after all.