Hitler’s Auschwitz bookkeeper to finally face justice as 94-year-old deemed fit for jail

In July 2015 94-year-old former Auschwitz camp bookkeeper Groening – he was responsible for collating and shipping back to Berlin the possessions of the dead – was found guilty of participation in the murders of 300,000 people and sentenced to four years in jail.

Groening never denied being at the Auschwitz camp in Nazi occupied Poland and admitted to the world it was an extermination centre where inmates were not expected to survive.  

He has not served a day behind bars as legal wrangling over the sentence and his advanced age continued until late last year when it was decided he was fit enough to go to jail.

Now prosecutors in Luneburg say his last appeal for clemency has failed and they expect him to be behind bars by the end of January.

In 1942, when he was twenty-one, Groening was sent to Auschwitz. He saw the horrors that took place there almost immediately.

“I was standing at the ramp,” he says, “and my task was to be part of the group supervising the luggage from an incoming transport.

“Sick people were lifted on to lorries. Red Cross lorries—they always tried to create the impression that people had nothing to fear.

“This process of selection proceeded in a relatively orderly fashion but when it was over it was just like a fairground. There was a load of rubbish, and next to this rubbish were ill people, unable to walk, perhaps a child that had lost its mother, or perhaps during searching the train somebody had hidden—and these people were simply killed with a shot through the head. 

“And the kind of way in which these people were treated brought me doubt and outrage. A child was simply pulled on the leg and thrown on a lorry … then when it cried like a sick chicken, they chucked it against the edge of the lorry. I couldn’t understand that an SS man would take a child and throw its head against the side of a lorry, or kill them by shooting them and then throw them on a lorry like a sack of wheat.”

Groening, who spent a year in Britain after the war as a prisoner, sang with a YMCA choir in the Midlands and scotland. And he kept quiet about just what he had done in the war.

Later, when pressed about the murder of children, he said; “The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them. The enemy is their growing up to become a Jew who could be dangerous.”

He was born in 1921 in Lower Saxony, son of a skilled textile worker. Groening’s father was a traditional conservative, “proud of what Germany had achieved.”

His father became an ultra-nationalist after Germany’s defeat in WW1 and he went bankrupt in 1929. The young Oskar, like millions of others, became intoxicated by the message of the rising Nazi party and he joined the Hitler Youth in 1933.

“I thought the Nazis were the people who wanted the best for Germany and who did something about it,” he said.

As a member of the Hitler Youth he took part in the burning of books written by “Jews or others who were degenerate.

“Within six months of the Nazis coming to power the five million unemployed had vanished from the streets and so everybody had work. Then in 1936 Hitler marched into the Rhineland and simply occupied it—nobody tried to stop him. We were terribly happy about this—my father opened a bottle of wine.”

At 17 he began an apprenticeship as a bank clerk. But news of Germany’s swift victories over Poland in 1939 and France the following year made him yearn for glory. 

He set his heart on joining the S.S. because it was an “elite unit and I wanted to be part of the elite.”

But instead of battlefield honours, the accomplished pen-pusher was sent to an office where he processed the wages of his comrades.

It didn’t displease him. He later said: “I’m a desk person. I wanted to work in a job that had both the soldier’s life and also the bureaucratic aspect.”

In 1942 jobs like his were given to men disabled at the front. He was told to report to Berlin where high ranking officers told him and some colleagues that they were being sent off for vital and secret work.

The destination: Auschwitz. The work: the destruction of human beings.

“We were reminded that we had sworn an oath with the motto ‘My loyalty is my honor,’ and that we could prove this loyalty by doing this task which was now given to us—the details of which we would find out later,” he said.

He found out soon after arrival. Although his main job was collating and sending back to Berlin the posessions of those murdered in the gas chambers, he serced on “ramp duty” – the place where the doomed Jews were sorted after arrival into those who would live to work and those who would be immediately gassed.

He heard a baby crying. “I saw another SS soldier grab the baby by the legs…” he said. “He smashed the baby’s head against the iron side of a truck until it was silent.”

He added: “Every night and every day I remember it for the nightmare it was. It was in 1942 that my SS chiefs in Berlin ordered me there.

“The Jews had diamonds and gold worth millions and it was my duty to make sure all of it got to Berlin.

“Down the years I have heard the cries of the dead in my dreams and in every waking moment. I will never be free of them”

“It was completely understood by all that the majority were going straight to the gas chamber, although some believed they were only going to be showered before going to work. Many Jews knew they were going to die.

“On one night in January 1943 I saw for the first time how the Jews were actually gassed. It was in a half-built farmyard near to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. A gas chamber was built there. We were searching the wood nearby for prisoners who had escaped.

“There were more than 100 prisoners and soon there were panic-filled cries as they were herded into the chamber and the door was shut. Then a sergeant with a gas mask went to a hole in the wall and from a tin shook Zyklon B gas pellets inside. In that moment the cries of the people inside rose to a crescendo, a choir of madness. 

“These cries I have ringing in my ears to this day.

“This guilt will never leave me. I can only plead for forgiveness and pray for atonement.”

Once, shortly after his return to Germany after being in the UK, he was sitting at the dinner table with his father and his parents-in-law and “they made a silly remark about Auschwitz,” insinuating he was a murderer.

“I exploded!” says Groening. “I banged my fist on the table and said, ‘This word and this connection are never, ever, to be mentioned again in my presence, otherwise I’ll move out!’ I was quite loud, and this was respected and it was never mentioned again.” 

Groening forgot the war, settled down to climb the management ladder at a glass factory, and kept quiet about his past.

It was only the prosecution of death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011 that paved the way for him to be charged.  Demjanjuk was found guilty without a single eyewitness left alive to say what his duties at the extermination camp of Sobibor had been: he was found guilty by dint of the fact he was there.

The same rule applied to Groening. He never killed anyone, but Auschwitz functioned because of obedient men like him.