The bookkeeper of death who wanted world to know true horror of Auschwitz
Even if it means he’s jailed for war crimes at 93...
OSKAR GROENING had been at Auschwitz for only a few days when he first saw a transport of Jews arrive. Hundreds of men, women and children stepped tentatively on to the railway unloading ramp that day in September 1942, clutching their few remaining belongings. They hoped, no doubt, that after a long and hellish journey across Europe, they had finally come to the end of the line.
And so they had. But far from their travails being over, the real horror was about to begin. Initially, the selection process to establish those who were to work and those who were to die went smoothly. The sick were taken away in lorries that purported to be from the Red Cross, but were of course going nowhere near a hospital.
By the end of the selection, 90 per cent of the transport was sent straight to the gas chambers. The others were despatched to work.
The job of 21-year-old Groening, a junior NCO in the SS, was to sort out the luggage with which the Jews had arrived. But just as the Red Cross lorries were a sham, so too was the bureaucratic process that registered the prisoners’ goods and valuables, for it gave them the impression that one day their property would be returned — and this kept them calm and ready to accept orders.
While Groening went about his work, fellow SS men began to search empty train carriages — and discovered there were still Jews who had escaped the selection process. ‘They were ill and vulnerable people,’ Groening recalled, ‘perhaps they were unable to walk, or a child who had lost his mother, or who somebody had hidden.’
The SS ‘cleared up’ these stragglers by shooting them in the head, then throwing them on to a lorry. And then Groening witnessed something that would stay with him for ever, an act so vile that it would regularly cause his dreams to end in screams.
‘Suddenly, I heard a baby crying,’ he told the German news magazine Der Spiegel many years later. ‘The child was lying on the ramp, wrapped in rags.
‘A mother had left it behind, perhaps because she knew that women with infants were sent to the gas chambers immediately. I saw another SS soldier grab the baby by the legs. The crying had bothered him. He smashed the baby’s head against the iron side of a truck until it was silent.’
Groening was outraged by what he saw, and complained to his officer, requesting a transfer to another posting. ‘It’s impossible, I can’t work here any more,’ he told the officer. ‘If it is necessary to exterminate the Jews, then it should be done within a certain framework.’
The officer refused Groening’s request, not only reminding him of his oath of loyalty to the SS, but also mendaciously assuring him that future selections would not be so ‘exceptional’.
Besides, Groening would not usually be required for such work. As a qualified bookkeeper, it was his job to sort and store the Jews’ money. As positions in Auschwitz went, it was relatively cushy, as it meant sitting in an office, and not dealing in person with those whom the money had belonged to.
And so, for the next two years, Oskar Groening worked as a cog in a factory of death, and even came to look back at his time there with some affection.
‘The special situation at Auschwitz,’ he later admitted, ‘led to friendships which I still think back on with joy.’
Groening is now 93 years old, and this week he was put on trial in the German city of Luneburg for his alleged complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Yesterday, he was confronted in court by the first former inmate of Auschwitz to give evidence. Eva Mozes Kor, 81, endured the hideous medical experiments of Auschwitz’s doctor, Josef Mengele, otherwise known as the Angel of Death.
She told the hearing how she and her sister Miriam evaded being gassed on arrival at the death camp thanks to Mengele’s obsession with twins — he experimented on twins in a twisted attempt to develop genetic techniques for Hitler’s dream of creating a ‘pure’ Aryan race.
Mrs Kor described the chaos as the train bringing her family from Romania arrived at the extermination camp. ‘Everyone was screaming in German, dogs were barking — it was the gates of Hell,’ she said. ‘I lost my father and my two older sisters immediately in front of my eyes, then my mother was swept away.’
She tried to ask Groening how much he knew about Mengele’s experiments, but the judge told her she was not allowed to do so, only to give a statement.
The case of Groening is exceptional for three reasons. First, Groening was not a guard — he was a bookkeeper — and he was therefore not a violent participant in genocide. By his own account, he was not one of those who clubbed, beat and shot Jews — and there are no witnesses who contradict him. All he did to the Jews was to count the money the Nazis stole from them.
Second, he does not deny that he is morally culpable. ‘Because of my job in Auschwitz,’ he told the court, ‘I am without question morally complicit in the killing of millions of people, most of whom were Jews. I ask them for forgiveness.’
Such an admission, it should be stressed, is extremely unusual for a former member of the SS.
But there is a third reason that makes Groening unique.
Unlike so many other surviving SS men and women, Groening is unnervingly candid about his actions. For over a decade, he has given interviews in which he fully admits to what he did and what he saw.
Furthermore, he knows that this honesty will help to get him convicted,
‘I am morally complicit in the killing of millions’
and in all likelihood, sentenced to spend his last days in jail. So why is Groening so open about his role in one of the greatest crimes in history? The answer is extraordinary — Groening wants his testimony to be used against those who deny the Holocaust took place.
‘I would like you to believe me,’ he says to the deniers. ‘I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened because I was there.’
As a result, Groening’s attitude places us in morally difficult territory. What are we to make of a man who admits to being part of the evil of Auschwitz, and yet who now uses the fact of his complicity to argue against the evil of Holocaust denial? Should his actions today mitigate the guilt of his actions during the war?
To answer these questions, we need to know a little more about Groening as a man.
If one is to be well-disposed towards him — and there is no reason on earth why we should be — then it is easy to paint Groening as a victim of his upbringing and his time.
Born in 1921, Groening’s textile-worker father had joined the rabidly nationalist Stahlhelm ( Steel Helmet) organisation — one of many paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany’s defeat in World War I — and before young Oskar was in his teens, he had joined its youth wing. From there, it was but a short step into the Hitler Youth after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Groening was an enthusiastic young fascist — participating in book burning, regarding the Jews as subhuman, and revelling in the Nazis’ supposed economic miracle.
After leaving school, Groening started training to be a bank clerk. With his somewhat gawky appearance and round owl-like spectacles, he certainly looked the part of a bean-counter.
But when war broke out, with his zealously nationalist upbringing, he was determined not to become a mere infantrymen in the Army, and Groening instead joined the fanatical Waffen-SS. Owing to his experience as a bookkeeper, he was not posted to a fighting unit, but given an administrative role, which was much to his liking. ‘I’m a desk person,’ he later said.
For three years, Groening fought the war from behind a ledger. But then, in September 1942, he and 20 others were ordered to Berlin, where they were given a lecture by a senior SS officer.
‘We were told we had to fulfil orders that were given in trust,’ Groening recalled. ‘A task that wouldn’t be without difficulties. A subordinate SS leader said we were to keep absolutely silent about this task. It was top secret, so that neither our relatives, nor friends, nor comrades, nor people who were not in the unit were to be told anything about it.’
The secret was that he would be sent to work in Auschwitz. Documentary evidence shows that, after his arrival and the selection he witnessed, Groening did indeed put in for a transfer to a fighting unit, and that his request was declined.
It is telling of the young SS man’s attitude that his difficulty lay not with the fact that Jews were being killed, but with the way in which they were put to death.
At the time, Groening saw the Jews as an enemy who represented as much of an existential threat to Germany as did the forces of the Soviet Union.
‘Between those two fights, one openly on the front line and the other against the Jews on the home front, we considered there was absolutely no difference,’ he said, ‘we exterminated nothing but enemies.’
As far as the likes of Groening were concerned, there was no moral difference between killing Jews in a camp, and fighting the Russians in a battle. Yet the horror of the killings still got to him.
On one occasion, he witnessed a gassing when he saw an SS man administering the deadly Zyklon B pellets through a hole in the ceiling of one of the ‘cottages’, as the extermination chambers were known.
Groening heard the screams coming from within, and then the awful silence, after which an officer ‘checked whether everything was OK and the people were dead’. He also witnessed a cremation, during which the effects of burning would cause the corpses to sit up, causing so some of his fellow SS men to laugh.
After two years, Groening left Auschwitz, and joined a frontline unit. He was captured by the British a month after the war in June 1945, and brought to this country as a POW.
Although he never denied being in th the SS, Groening did not admit to his ti time at Auschwitz, as he recognised th that what had happened there, in his own understated words, ‘did not always comply with human rights’.
Groening appeared to have a pleasant time in Britain, and he even joined a YMCA choir, with which he was allowed to tour England and Scotland singing Germ man hymns and English folk songs.
He returned to Germany in 1948, and rebuilt his life. He rose through theh management ranks of a local glass factory, married and had two children. And for many years, Groening never mentioned his time in n Auschwitz. But then, one day, his a attitude completely changed. A k keen philatelist, a fellow member of Groening’s stamp club, presented him with a book called The Auschwitz Lie, which denied the genocide took place.
Groening was appalled, and annota tated the book with his memories a and observations, before returning it in disgust. To his shock, some six months later, Groening found that his remarks had been featured and repudiated in a neo-Nazi publication, and he started to receive threats and crank calls from those who maintained that he was a liar.
For the former SS man, this was the moment on which his life hinged. He could have kept quiet, and ignored the Holocaust deniers. But he was determined to combat them.
And so, to his credit, and perhaps seeking some sort of atonement, Groening decided to let the truth out. He started by writing an 87-page memoir for his sons, in which he told them everything.
But he was to make a much wider revelation, in the form of a ninehour interview he gave to the documentary maker Laurence Rees, for his BBC series on Auschwitz.
For Rees, that interview with Groening was, he says, a ‘ strange experience’, with his interviewee speaking ‘ almost as if there was another Oskar Groening who worked at Auschwitz 60 years ago, and about the “other” Groening he could be brutally honest’.
It is that honesty about his ‘former’ self that now sees Groening in court. Although he deserves to be punished, it should also be acknowledged that Groening’s candour is of enormous benefit for those who wage today’s war against Holocaust denial.
Like many during those hateful times, Groening made many wrong decisions as a young man, which ended up with him participating in the attempted destruction of an entire people. For those actions, he should be punished.
But Groening’s coming clean, and the reasons behind it, should be applauded. Finally, as an old man, he has done some good.
He heard the screams from gas chambers