In His Defence

Extermination: Some 1.5million people, mostly Jews, were killed at Auschwitz during WWII

In His Defence

"It is beyond question that I am morally complicit. This moral guilt I acknowledge here, before the victims, with regret and humility."
"As concerns guilt before the law, you [presiding Judge Franz Kompisch] must decide."
(former) SS guard Oskar Groening, 93, Luneburg, Germany

Regret, presumably, since no one would relish being hauled before a court of law 70 years after the fact, to answer for his part in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, marked for death because they were Jews. Humility! Really? How can one be humble when he still retains his original contempt for Jews because they are Jews, accepting the prevalent Nazi slogans of Jews as enemies to be rounded up and annihilated at the time he was an Auschwitz guard, and still believing in the inferiority of Jews to the present time.

He feels himself to be innocent of any crime. Nicht schuldig, because he was simply following orders. At the Nuremberg trials, that was the standard response; following orders. Perhaps if the individual moral compass was straitened to begin with, there was no problem when it went completely askew. Mr. Groening feels confident that because in his mind he committed no overt violent acts against the people destined for death personally, that ushering them to their death represented no actual crime he is not guilty.

He seems to feel that he will be acquitted. After all, he has lent himself to the revelations of what he observed, and what had occurred in the years when he was on duty with the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Doesn't that frankness count for something? Does it not compensate for his moral lapses? He has testified at the trials of others, to aid the prosecution. Perhaps never imagining that he too would face trial for the utter disinterest he took in the humanity he helped consign to death.

But someone like Thomas Walther who has worked since 2006 for Germany's central office tracking Nazi war crimes felt differently. Mr. Walther has committed his now-elderly life to seeing justice for the multitudes of the dead. He is representing 31 of the 53 co-plaintiffs present at the trial, like Hedy Bohm, sent to Auschwitz at 15, separated from her parents, never to see them again, although she managed to survive.

 -- Jewish Virtual Library -- Last walk to the gas chambers

A respectable but bored bank accountant is how he described himself, the man conscripted in 1940 and who volunteered for the SS, attracted to its fame, "always to be out front", its exploits on behalf of the Third  Reich featuring the SS which returned from assignments wherever and whenever tasked to do the ugly work of black fascism "covered in glory" as when the SS expeditiously aided in Germany's success, subduing and occupying Poland and France.

A committed and patriotic Nazi himself, he began to doubt the wisdom of Adolf Hitler's ambitions only with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941; strategically unwise, he thought, in consideration of Russia's legendary tenacity and its military might. But for the most part, Mr. Groening wasn't thinking in terms of how he would advise the Nazi hierarchy of the manner in which it should strategize its takeover of the world community. He was absorbed in the unpleasantness unfolding before him.

Recalling prisoners marshalled into a farmhouse, watching as a member of the SS tipped gas into an opening of the house, listening as the screams of the prisoners trapped within "grew louder and more desperate, and after a short time became quieter and then stopped completely. That was the only time I saw a complete gassing. I did not take part", he stressed, to the court.

His assignment to Auschwitz, he said, was spoken of as "a duty that will demand more from you than the front", one that was vital "to achieving the Final Solution" of eliminating Jews. So that was all right, because it was a most important duty as a patriotic German, and a member of the fabled SS battalions. As a dutiful soldier of the Third Reich, he did his part. About 6,500 members of the SS worked at Auschwitz.

Of that number, 49 have been convicted of war crimes. In Auschwitz, an estimated 1.5 million people had their lives summarily extinguished, most of them Jewish men, women and children. For Mr. Groening, and the rest of his ilk, the Final Solution wasn't quite completed.