Oskar Gröning trial: ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’ admits moral guilt
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Version 0 of 1. As he entered the courtroom pushing a walking frame, Oskar Gröning cut the figure of a frail old man, a policeman helping him ease the wheels down the steps, his lawyer lowering him into his seat. A blast of camera flashes, reflected in the lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles, added to his sense of vulnerability. But as he began to talk, the 93-year-old became animated and loquacious, recounting the two years he had spent at Auschwitz extermination camp after volunteering for the SS, the Nazi party’s protection squadron, at the age of 20. At the end of his 50-minute speech, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” expressed his remorse for the role he had played in the Nazi killing machine, an admission that few had expected he would make at all, let alone just a couple of hours into the start of his trial for being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews. “It is without question that I am morally complicit in the murder of millions of Jews through my activities at Auschwitz,” said Gröning, a retired bank clerk, clutching his notes and looking directly at the bench. “Before the victims, I also admit to this moral guilt here, with regret and humility. But as to the question whether I am criminally culpable, that’s for you to decide.” When minutes later the judge, Franz Kompisch, adjourned the proceedings for lunch, Gröning unpacked his plastic box and removed a cheese sandwich from its foil. As he ate, he was approached in the virtually empty courtroom by a woman pushing a walking frame. Eighty-one-year-old Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor and writer who had travelled from Terre Haute in Indiana for the trial in the north German town, said to him: “Mr Gröning, I have much sympathy for you. I know this is mentally, physically and emotionally hard for you and I think you are courageous.” He nodded what appeared to be a sign of his appreciation in return. It was a brief but suspenseful moment in a day that was full of tension and drama. Presiding over what will be one of the last Nazi trials in Germany, Kompisch acknowledged it was “anything but an easy event” for those present. “Without exaggeration … this trial will attract a lot of attention and cause many emotions to be released. But we must remember that it is a criminal trial, albeit one with its own historical context,” he told the court. Survivors of the Holocaust – many of whom have travelled from the US, Canada and Hungary to act as co-plaintiffs in the hope, after 70 years, of seeing justice done for their murdered relatives – listened intently as Gröning spoke. Among the many who had queued, some since dawn, to enter the courtroom was Rainer Höss, the grandson of the former Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss. The 49-year-old, who has publicly denounced his grandfather and befriended several Holocaust survivors, including some of those in the court, said: “I am here like everyone else, to see justice being done, even though it is very late in the day.” At times the often tense exchanges between Gröning and Kompisch, who, being in his 40s, could have been the defendant’s grandson, resembled intergenerational clashes familiar to many German families. Pushing him for an answer on whether he knew what the SS stood for when he volunteered to join it, Kompisch said: “You mean to tell me you didn’t ask what was going on? How can you explain that?” Gröning replied: “It is hard to describe it to someone of your generation who was not there. It is simply inexplicable.” Kompisch said: “Then help me try to understand.” To which Gröning shook his head and said: “No, no, no – impossible”. Gröning described how as a young man his enthusiasm for the Nazi cause had quickly grown to euphoria, not least because of Adolf Hitler’s success in dealing with Germany’s horrendously high inflation and unemployment levels. Later, he had not hesitated to take up an offer to leave the bank where he worked, to join what he considered to be the “dashing and zestful” SS, he said. As a young SS recruit he recalled being assigned a special and secret task, and was called along with other young men to a marble-clad conference room in the heart of the Nazi power centre in Berlin to swear an oath of allegiance to the Third Reich. “They told us that we had to sign up on the spot to certain obligations regarding tasks we would be given that would be unpleasant but that had to be done in order to ensure the final victory,” he said. But he insisted he had not known that Auschwitz was a factory of death until after his arrival there in the autumn of 1942. “I knew it was a place that I didn’t want to be, that made me scared, but I didn’t know why,” he said. On his first evening, he and the other SS newcomers had been plied with vodka by their superiors. It was revealed to them that Jews arriving at Auschwitz who were considered unsuitable for slave labour were “disposed of”. “It completely shook me,” he said. “I had had five glasses of vodka and continued to think about it when I woke up next morning.” He claimed that a breakthrough moment when his “enthusiasm for Adolf” began to wane had come several weeks into his arrival when a crying baby was discovered hidden in one of the suitcases, likely left by a mother who had hoped to prevent its death. He witnessed an SS guard pick the baby out and smash it against a lorry. “It was the worst moment of any I had experienced,” he said. “The next day I went to see my head of department and told him I wanted out of the whole business. My precise formulation was: ‘If things like that are always happening here, what a shitty dump this is, and I want out.” He succeeded in securing a transfer only after making his third application, he said. Several times Gröning, who was flanked in the courtroom by two medics with resuscitation equipment, had to be steered back onto the subject by his lawyer after diverting too much from the judge’s line of questioning. At one point he sipped from a bottle of water, and remarked: “Drinking from this reminds me of when I drank from those vodka bottles in Auschwitz.” Reading from the 85-page indictment, Jens Lehmann, the state prosecutor, detailed Gröning’s tasks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, including his responsibility for taking the suitcases from prisoners as they arrived at the ramp and were selected into groups of those who would work and those who would be sent to their immediate deaths in the gas chambers. Gröning’s main task, he said, had been collecting the money that was found in prisoners’ clothing and luggage, recording it in a ledger, keeping it in a steel safe, and at various intervals, taking the money to the Reich headquarters in Berlin, a task which earned him the nickname “the bookkeeper of Auschwitz”. It was crucial to the case, he said, that Gröning had long admitted knowing from the very beginning of his tenure that Auschwitz-Birkenau was an extermination camp. “Already on his first day the accused was informed by a colleague that those who were not chosen to work would be sent to their deaths,” Lehmann said. Prosecutors have concentrated the charge on the period between May and July 1944, the time of the mass deportation of Hungary’s Jewish community during which 137 trains brought 425,000 people to Auschwitz, of whom at least 300,000 were exterminated in the gas chambers. During that period guards worked round the clock as the trains rolled in, sometimes several at once, to ensure as many Jews were murdered as possible as the war began drawing to a close. Marcus Goldbach, the lawyer for Eva Mozes Kor, and one of 12 representing the 60 co-plaintiffs, said he had not expected to hear Gröning admit his guilt. “It’s a surprise that he answered in such detail and really showed us some insight into his motivation and his attempts to escape Auschwitz,” he said outside the court. “He obviously realised at some point he was trapped. He went further today than he has ever done by asking for forgiveness.” But Esther Altmann, a New York psychologist whose father was the only member of his family to survive Auschwitz, said that while it was a relief that the four-month-long trial had started, seeing a 93-year-old in the dock simply reinforced the shortcomings of a legal system that had done too little, too late to bring concentration camp guards to justice. “All through the trial today, I was thinking: ‘Where are all the SS who continued to live after the war?’,” she said. “How many of them said: ‘Mea culpa, I was 18, I got caught up in the collective psychosis of murder and extermination’? This trial after 70 years is all the more painful because it evokes sense of how much has not happened.” The trial continues on Wednesday. |