‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’ convicted of war crimes dies at 96

Oskar Groening, a German SS guard known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” who was convicted in 2015 of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews at the Nazi death camp during World War II, died March 9 before he could serve a four-year prison sentence. He was 96.

A spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office in Hanover, Germany, told German news sources that Groening’s lawyer confirmed the death. No other details were disclosed.

After training as a bank clerk, Groening joined the Waffen SS, an elite paramilitary branch of Germany’s Nazi regime in 1939 when he was 18. He spent more than two years at Auschwitz, a death camp in occupied Poland, where more than 1 million people were killed during the war.

One of his jobs was to retrieve the luggage of Holocaust victims and confiscate their money. He recorded the amounts for the camp’s “foreign currency department,” carefully noting whether the cash came from France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, the United States or other countries. He sent the money to SS headquarters in Berlin.

“I do not feel myself guilty,” Groening told the German newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung in 2013, “because I didn’t give anyone so much as a slap in the face.”

Later, after encountering Holocaust deniers among his fellow Germans, Groening became one of the few deathcamp guards to describe what he had witnessed.

“I see it as my task, now at my age, to face up to these things that I experienced and to oppose the Holocaust deniers who claim that Auschwitz never happened,” he told the BBC in 2004. “I want to tell those deniers I have seen the gas chambers, I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the burning pits — and I want you to believe me that these atrocities happened. I was there.”

As a self-described “small cog in the gears” who said he was not an active participant in killing, Groening believed he would not be prosecuted. “Where would you stop?” he said in 2013.