93-year-old former SS guard to go on trial for 300,000 Auschwitz murders

A 93-year-old former SS officer is to go on trial in Germany charged with taking part in the mass murder of at least 300,000 people at Auschwitz. The German defendant, Oskar Groening, was known as the “bookkeeper” at the death camp. He was tasked with counting the banknotes taken from prisoners and forwarding them to his Nazi masters in Berlin, according to prosecutors in Hanover. He is also accused of helping to remove victims’ luggage so they were not seen by new arrivals, and so covering up the traces of the mass killing.

I was ashamed for decades and I am still ashamed today - Not of my acts, because I never killed anyone. But I offered my aid. I was a cog in the killing machine that eliminated millions of innocent people.

Oskar Groening, former Auschwitz worker

Prosecutors said Groening was aware the predominantly Jewish prisoners deemed unfit to work “were murdered directly after their arrival in the gas chambers of Auschwitz”. He will appear in court on 21 April charged with at least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. Fifty-five co-plaintiffs, mainly survivors and victims’ relatives, will be represented at the trial, expected to be one of the last of its kind. Groening told the German daily Bild in 2005 that he regretted working at Auschwitz, saying he still heard the screams from the gas chamber decades later.