It also produced odd encounters, like when Groening embraced Eva Kor, another survivor, when she went over to confront him.
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“This is an incredibly important case”, he said.
Commentators remain divided on the verdict, with Telegraph journalist, Emma Barnett, talking of Groening as “the bastard who robbed innocent, terrified people of all their cash and worldly goods”.
In May this year Dr Zuroff was quoted as saying: “Despite the somewhat prevalent assumption that it is too late to bring Nazi murderers to justice, the figures clearly prove otherwise, and we are trying to ensure that at least several of these criminals will be brought to trial during the coming years”. There will be others. By Groening’s own concession, he was an enthusiastic Nazi back then. “I was so shaken,” Groening recalled, later asking his commander for a transfer from Auschwitz.
Prosecutors noted that while he didn’t pull a trigger, he did make mass murder profitable for Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
Groening known as the “book-keeper” admits keeping watch as thousands were led to the gas chambers, among them Kor’s family.
Every individual is in the end responsible for upholding the basic ethics and values that are the foundation of our civilization. Nestler, in an interview with Deutsche Welle this week, said his clients had been left disgusted by Kor’s actions, which he said should have been kept private.
Klein’s arrival at Auschwitz in spring 1944 coincided with the time that Groening was working at the camp, raising the possibility that their paths might have crossed. “I’m aware of this. I agree with that”, he said.
In April, Groening described some of the murders that he witnessed at Auschwitz.
Groening’s defence team asked the judges to take into account his deteriorating health but also his willingness to testify in detail about his time in Auschwitz, which many defendants in similar cases had refused to do.
You mentioned the word “justice”.
Cornelius Nestler, the plaintiff’s lawyer in the Oskar Groening case, reiterated that those who co-operated in running Auschwitz must “take responsibility” for helping “a murder machine”, speaking to press outside the court in Lueneber, Wednesday.
The 94-year-old ex-Schutzstaffel (SS) soldier was part of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s paramilitary unit and worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp plundering valuables from the suitcases of Hungarian Jews as the prisoners walked off trains and into gas chambers. “I saw the crematoria”, he told the BBC during a 2005 documentary. “I don’t find what he did good at all”, Groening said.
More than 170,000 people were investigated for Nazi war crimes between 1945 and 2005. “Today it’s dozens. But don’t be fooled: This is not the last Nazi trial”.
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The first investigations of Groening took place in 1977. “But there will be others”.
