Germany – A 94-year-old former SS sergeant who served in Auschwitz testified Wednesday he helped the death camp function in his role sorting cash and valuables seized from Jews after they arrived in cattle-cars.
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Oskar Groening told the Lueneburg state court in a statement read by his attorney that it was hard today to understand the blind obedience he had to the Nazi system even when witnessing the terrible atrocities perpetrated at the death camp in German-occupied Poland.
“There was a self-denial in me that today I find impossible to explain,” Groening said, the dpa news agency reported. “Perhaps it was also the convenience of obedience with which we were brought up, which allowed no contradiction. This indoctrinated obedience prevented registering the daily atrocities as such and rebelling against them.”
Groening is accused of helping Auschwitz function in his job at the camp for which the German press has dubbed him the “Accountant of Auschwitz.” He guarded prisoners’ baggage on the ramps, but his main task was to collect and tally money stolen from the new arrivals and then send it to Berlin.
Though pleas are not entered in the German system, as Groening’s trial on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder opened in April he told the court he felt a moral guilt for what he had done. He faces a possible three to 15 years in prison if convicted.
In testimony Wednesday, Auschwitz survivor Irene Weiss, 84, told the court she vividly remembered arriving at the death camp as a 13-year-old and being immediately separated from her entire family except for her older sister.
She said she asked other prisoners when she would see them again.
“A woman pointed to a chimney and said: ‘Do you see the smoke? There is your family,'” she said, according to a transcript of her statement from her attorneys.
Weiss, who joined the trial as a co-plaintiff like many other Holocaust survivors as allowed under German law, said she considered Groening more than just a “small cog in the machine.”
“If he were sitting here today wearing his SS uniform, I would tremble, and all the horror that I experienced as a 13-year old would return to me,” said Weiss, who lost her parents, younger sister and three brothers in Auschwitz. “To that 13-year-old, any person who wore that uniform in that place, represented terror and the depths to which humanity can sink, regardless of what function they performed.”
In his statement, Groening said even though he had known what was going on at Auschwitz, the personal stories of the co-plaintiffs during the trial had brought home the enormity of the atrocities.
“I can only ask my God for forgiveness,” he said.
Please remove this picture. It is forbidden according to halacha to look at the face of a rasha.
I cant wait to read his obituary. Though he seems to have more regret for his actions than Barry Obama.
Is it possible he asks for forgiveness because he faces prison time?
However, what could a guard have done during the WWII if he recognized the enormity of the evil he was made a part of? Was he able to withdraw from his position?
Never trust a German, especially when he opens his filthy mouth to speak. They are all accustomed to speaking in 4 to 7 syllable words, with decidedly too few vowels. They may sound convincing to the gullible but we are not buying it. The only reason this old beast is talking “repentance” is he wants a shorter sentence.
Germans are congenitally incapable of experiencing regret, much less repent for their crimes, which make them a quintessentially narcissistic and sociopathic nation. If we could make them disappear, that would be a worthwhile undertaking. Realistically, we have to hope and trust that ultimately RS”O will take care of them.
The old beast said that he will ask HIS god for forgiveness. Which one is that?