Justice, yes. But so many Nazi monsters were left free to prosper
YESTERDAY morning a court in northern Germany sent a 94-year- old man to prison for four years. Sentences of that length are normally doled out for an offence such as causing actual bodily harm, but this man’s crime was more heinous than that.
In fact, the Regional Court in his home town of Luneburg found that the man was guilty of being an accessory to the murders of 300,000 people. That is the number of people who live in Nottingham.
Oskar Groening committed his crime more than 70 years ago some 500 miles from where he was tried — at Auschwitz.
Despite being found an accessory to so many murders, Groening’s role at the concentration camp was hardly very senior, or indeed hands-on. He was a qualified bookkeeper, and it was his job to sort and store the money belonging to the Jews.
Unlike many of his fellow SS men at Auschwitz, Groening neither actually killed anybody himself, nor even so much as touched them. Instead, he spent most of his time over two miles from the gas chambers, counting money. Groening has nevertheless always admitted a degree of guilt.
‘It is without question that I am morally complicit in the murder of millions of Jews through my activities at Auschwitz,’ he told the court in April. ‘Before the victims, I also admit to this moral guilt here, with regret and humility. But as to the question of whether I am criminally culpable, that’s for you to decide.’
Although the court’s decision yesterday was welcomed by many around the world — not least by the survivors of Auschwitz and the families of those who were slaughtered — Groening’s conviction raises some further, very awkward questions.
Why has it taken so long to bring him to trial? What happened to all the other SS men and women who worked at Auschwitz and the hundreds of other camps? Is this not just a token display of retributive justice by a country that has not done enough to purge its Nazi past?
THE more one looks at these questions, the more tempting it is to reach an uncomfortable conclusion. For the uneasy truth is that Oskar Groening can be seen as the little man, the fall guy who has taken the rap while so many other, more reprehensible SS men and Nazis not only escaped justice, but also managed to thrive in postwar Germany.
To be fair, some members of the Auschwitz camp staff were brought to justice after the war. From 1946 to 1949, the Americans extradited around 1,000 SS men and women who had worked at the camp to Poland, where many were tried. The majority received prison sentences, although senior members of the camp’s staff were executed.
Among those imprisoned in Poland were SS men who had performed roles similar to Oskar Groening.
These included the likes of Richard Schroeder, who worked in Auschwitz for over four years as an accountant. Although he was not directly responsible for the murders that took place, the Poles judged that simply by working at the camp, Schroeder was an accessory. He was sentenced to ten years, but in the Fifties he was released under an amnesty.
Groening, meanwhile, had managed to escape justice, not least because he never told his British captors where he had worked. After a spell as a PoW in Britain, he returned to Germany in 1948, where he rebuilt his life.
But while the Poles seemed to have the right idea of what constituted justice, in West Germany the situation was very different.
Around 7,000 people had worked at Auschwitz, and the majority of them, like Groening, lived regular and normal lives, unmolested by the authorities in their Fatherland. In the words of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, these men and women were ‘the murderers among us’, seemingly ordinary people who worked as builders, teachers, factory workers.
Although no members of the Auschwitz staff are known to have secured roles in public life, there were plenty of senior Nazis, many of them responsible for the implementation of the Holocaust, who slipped easily into influential roles in the new Germany. Take, for example, Hans Globke, a senior Nazi civil servant who not only helped to write the Nuremberg Laws that robbed German Jews of their citizenship, but also worked as a legal advisor to none other than Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust.
After the war, Globke became a senior aide to Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and was made the director of the Federal Chancellery.
Then there was SS LieutenantColonel Rudolf Bilfinger, who took part in many of the discussions about how to resolve the ‘Jewish question’. Bilfinger organised, among other elements of genocide, the sterilisation of ‘half-breeds’ and the theft of Jewish property. After 1945, Bilfinger became a senior court counsellor in the city of Mannheim.
Another notorious Nazi who emerged into public life after the war was SS General Otto Winkelmann, who was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to become the higher SS and police chief in occupied Hungary. Alongside Eichmann, Winkelmann was instrumental in deporting 400,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly to Auschwitz. After the war, Winkelmann became a member of Kiel’s city council, and the chairman of the Association of Former Police Officers.
And while some senior Nazis escaped justice scot-free, others received sentences that were so mild as to be farcical.
Among these was the particularly sinister Dr Franz Six, who led one of the notorious Einsatzgruppen ‘death squads’ that followed the German armed forces into the Soviet Union, and ‘mopped up’ Jews.
Had Britain been invaded, Six had been earmarked to do the same murderous job in this country. After the war, Six was indeed convicted, but he served only four years of a 20year-sentence. He then joined the German intelligence services, and ended up becoming the advertising manager of the car firm Porsche.
Similarly, Dr Werner Best, the Reich Commissioner in Denmark, also received inadequate justice for his crimes. It was Best who ordered the murders, among others, of the wellknown anti-Nazi poet Kaj Munk.
After the war, Best was sentenced to death in Denmark, but in the end he served only a five-year prison sentence. A lawyer by training, he found lucrative work as a legal adviser for a huge trust, as well as employment at the German Foreign Office.
By the early Sixties, the position in Germany had begun to change. The Israelis’ successful abduction and conviction of Eichmann — who had fled to Argentina — showed that if there was a will, then Nazis could be brought to justice.
In 1963, 22 former members of the Auschwitz camp staff found themselves in the dock in Frankfurt. Of course, this was a tiny proportion of 6,000 who had escaped justice completely, but it was seen as a start, and a symbol that West Germany was doing its bit to atone.
Six defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, including Wilhelm Boger, who was quietly working in an office at the Heinkel aircraft factory. At Auschwitz, Boger had repeatedly and savagely tortured prisoners, until, in the words of one inmate, they became ‘a mass of bleeding pulp’. Many, of course, died.
The remaining defendants at Frankfurt were sentenced to terms of between three and 14 years, although some would be released early. Among them was Hans Stark, who admitted to gassing and shooting prisoners at the camp. After the war, he had taught at agricultural schools and even advised the Frankfurt Chamber of Agriculture. Sentenced to ten years, he served just five.
STARK was described by a psychologist in a way that would apply to many of those who worked at Auschwitz, including Oskar Groening. ‘Defendant Stark is an example of how a young man with average talents and an entirely normal, inconspicuous disposition readily submits to what may be called a reversal of conscience,’ observed Dr Helmut Lechler.
‘He is an example of a person’s vulnerability to letting himself be perverted and turned into a tool of totalitarian potentates. As a result, his moral control is replaced with the mindset of a Fuhrer. The final consequence is the development of functionaries without a conscience.’
The irony of the Frankfurt trial was that the witnesses were not just prisoners, but also former SS men who had worked at Auschwitz and either escaped justice or served their sentences. As a result, a distinction was made in the eyes of the German public between the monstrous Auschwitz staff in the dock, and the supposedly now ‘decent’ Auschwitz staff who were giving evidence against them.
Yesterday, that distinction was finally eradicated, at least in the eyes of the law. There are still some who maintain that it is unfair to try men like Groening, who were operating in a very different moral environment to that which exists in Germany today.
Ultimately, one must heed the words of those who survived Auschwitz. One of them was Leon Schwarzbaum, who yesterday declared that he was satisfied.
‘What do I expect?’ he asked during the trial. ‘Justice — nothing else. No hate, no hate. If someone like me lost 30 family members, after so many years what should one think? The only thing I want is justice, nothing else.’
Groening has received just that. It is to Germany’s discredit that many thousands never did.