Ex-Nazi guard faces 300,000 charges
‘Accountant of Auschwitz’ goes on trial in Germany for accessory to murder
“I want to tell those deniers that I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the burning pits, and I want to assure you that these atrocities happened. I was there.” OSKAR GROENING FORMER NAZI SS GUARD
LUENEBURG, GERMANY— Hedy Bohm had just turned 16 when the Nazis packed her and her parents onto a cattle car in May 1944 and sent them from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland.
After three days and nights in darkness, crammed into the standingroom-only car with babies wailing, the doors were flung open. “An inferno,” is how she remembers the scene she saw.
“The soldiers yelling at us, guns and rifles pointed at us,” the Toronto resident recalled. “Big dogs barking at us held back on their leashes by the soldiers.”
One of the black-uniformed men on the ramp was likely SS guard Oskar Groening. Now 93, he goes on trial Tuesday in a state court in the northern city of Lueneburg on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. Two of those deaths were Bohm’s parents, who are believed to have been killed in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival in Auschwitz.
Groening’s trial is the first to test a line of German legal reasoning opened by the 2011 trial of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk on allegations he was a Sobibor death camp guard, which has unleashed an 11th-hour wave of new investigations of Nazi war crimes suspects.
Prosecutors argue that anyone who was a death camp guard can be charged as an accessory to murders committed there, even without evidence of involvement in a specific death.
Bohm, 86, moved to Toronto after the war. She will testify as a witness about her Auschwitz experience, although she doesn’t remember Groening. She is one of about 60 Holocaust survivors or their relatives from the U.S., Canada, Israel and elsewhere who have joined the prosecution as co-plaintiffs, as is allowed under German law.
Groening has openly acknowledged serving as an SS non-commissioned officer at Auschwitz, though denies committing any crimes. His memories of the cattle cars packed with Jews arriving at the death camp are just are vivid as Bohm’s.
“A child who was lying there was simply pulled by the legs and chucked into a truck to be driven away,” he told the BBC in an interview 10 years ago. “And when it screamed like a sick chicken, they then bashed it against the edge of the truck so it would shut up.”
His attorney, Hans Holtermann, has prevented Groening from giving any new interviews, but said his client will make a statement as the trial opens. Earlier, Groening said he felt an obligation to talk about his past to confront those who deny the Holocaust.
“I want to tell those deniers that I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the burning pits, and I want to assure you that these atrocities happened,” he said. “I was there.”
Though acknowledgement of his past could help mitigate the 15-year maximum sentence Groening faces if convicted, the court’s focus will be on whether legally he can be found an accessory to murder for his actions.
Groening is accused of helping to operate the death camp between May and June 1944, when some 425,000 Jews from Hungary were brought there and at least 300,000 almost immediately gassed to death.
His job was to deal with the belongings stolen from camp victims. Prosecutors allege among other things that he was charged with helping collect and tally money that was found, which has earned him the moniker “the accountant of Auschwitz” from the German media.
“He helped the Nazi regime benefit economically,” the indictment said, “and supported the systematic killings.”
Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said even low-ranking guards were necessary for Adolf Hitler’s genocidal machine to run.
At Auschwitz, Bohm’s father, who was disabled, was sent one way with other men, and she and her mother were motioned to go another direction — which turned out to be directly to the gas chambers. But in the confusion, Bohm and her mother were separated. As she ran to catch up with her, a Nazi guard with a rifle blocked her path and said “no, you go to the right.”
“I cried after her, she heard me and we looked at each other,” Bohm remembered. “She didn’t say anything and then turned and kept walking. I never saw her again.”