Oskar Groening (“The Accountant of Auschwitz”)

Oskar Groening was a 21-year-old petty thief in 1944 when he took a job as a bookkeeper at Auschwitz. Between May 16 and July 11 of that year, 137 trains carrying 425,000 Jews arrived at the concentration camp. Holding the rank of SS Sergeant, Groening was responsible for cataloging the cash and valuables plundered from the luggage of newly arrived prisoners earning him the nickname, “The Accountant of Auschwitz.”

Groening was born on June 10, 1921, in Lower Saxony, the son of a strict conservative and skilled textile worker. His mother died when he was four. His father, a proud nationalist, joined the Stahlhelm (a German paramilitary organization) after Germany's defeat in the First World War. Like many Germans, he was angry at how Germany was treated following the Treaty of Versailles. In 1929, his textile business went bankrupt.

Groening states that his childhood was one of “discipline, obedience and authority.” Military uniforms fascinated Groening, and one of his earliest memories is of looking at photos of his grandfather, who served in an elite regiment of the Duchy of Brunswick, on his horse and playing his trumpet.

He joined the Scharnhorst, the Stahlhelm's youth organization as a small boy in the 1930s, and later the Hitler Youth when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Influenced by his family's values, he felt that Nazism was advantageous to Germany and believed that the Nazis “were the people who wanted the best for Germany and who did something about it.” He participated in the burning of books written by Jews and other authors that the Nazis considered degenerate in the belief that he was helping Germany free itself from an alien culture.

Groening left school with high marks and began a traineeship as a bank clerk when he was 17, but war was declared shortly after he started employment. Groening wanted to join an elite army unit and joined the SS in 1940. Groening worked at a desk in salary administration until 1942 when the SS ordered that desk jobs be reserved for injured veterans.

Groening was sent to the SS economic in Berlin and told he was being assigned to a top-secret task and was required to sign a declaration that they would not disclose it to family or friends, or people not in their unit. He subsequently boarded a train with instructions to report to the commandant of Auschwitz, a place Groening had not heard of before.

One of the officers at Auschwitz said Groening’s bank clerk skills would be useful, and took him to barracks where the prisoners’ money was kept. Groening was told that when prisoners were registered into the camp, their money was stored here and later returned to them when they left.

It became clear that Auschwitz was not a normal internment camp with above-average SS rations, but that it served an additional function. Groening was informed that money taken from interned Jews was not returned to them. When he inquired further, his colleagues confirmed that the Jews were being systematically exterminated.

After Auschwitz

Groening’s application to transfer to a unit on the front-line was successful and, in 1944, he joined an SS unit fighting in the Ardennes. He was wounded and sent to a field hospital before rejoining his unit, which eventually surrendered to the British on his birthday – June 10, 1945.

He realized that declaring “involvement in the concentration camp of Auschwitz would have a negative response,” so he wrote on the form given to him by the British that he worked for the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt. He did this because “the victor's always right,” and that things happened at Auschwitz that “did not always comply with human rights.”

Groening and the rest of his SS colleagues were imprisoned in an old Nazi concentration camp. He was sent to Britain as a forced laborer in 1946 where he had a “very comfortable life.” He ate good food and earned money, and travelled through the Midlands and Scotland giving concerts for four months, singing German hymns and traditional English folk songs to appreciative British audiences.

Return to Germany

Groening was released and returned to Germany in 1947 or 1948. Upon being reunited with his wife, he said, “Girl, do both of us a favor: don’t ask.” He was unable to regain his job at the bank due to having been a member of the SS, so he got a job at a glass factory, working his way up to a management position. He became head of personnel, and was made an honorary judge of industrial tribunal cases.

Groening led a normal middle-class life after the war. A keen stamp collector, he was once at his local philately club's annual meeting, more than 40 years after the war, when he fell into a conversation about politics with the man next to him. The man told him it was “terrible” that Holocaust denial was illegal in Germany, and went on to tell Groening how so many bodies could not have been burnt, and that the volume of gas that was supposed to have been used would have killed all living things in the vicinity.

Groening said little in response to these statements, replying only, “I know a little more about that, we should discuss it some time.” The man recommended a pamphlet by Holocaust denier Thies Christophersen. Groening obtained a copy and mailed it to Christophersen with his own commentary. “I saw everything,” he wrote. “The gas chambers, the cremations, the selection process. One and a half million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz. I was there.”

Groening then began receiving phone calls and letters from strangers who tried to tell him Auschwitz was not actually a place for exterminating human beings in gas chambers. It became apparent that his comments condemning Holocaust denial had been printed in a neo-Nazi magazine, and that most of the anonymous calls and letters were “from people who tried to prove that what I had seen with my own eyes, what I had experienced in Auschwitz was a big, big mistake, a big hallucination on my part because it hadn't happened.”

Because of such comments, Groening decided to speak openly about his experiences, and publicly denounce people who maintain the events he witnessed never happened. He says his message to Holocaust deniers is: “I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened because I was there.”

In September 2014, Groening had been charged by state prosecutors with having been an accessory to murder for his role at Auschwitz receiving and processing prisoners and their personal belongings. The indictment stated that Groening economically advanced Nazi Germany and aided the systematic killing of 300,000 of the 425,000 Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz by 137 railway transports during the summer of 1944.

The 93-year-old was put on trial in Lüneburg, Germany, on April 20, 2015, after the court ruled that he was fit to stand trial. In an opening statement, Groening asked for forgiveness: “For me there's no question that I share moral guilt,” he told the judges, acknowledging that he knew about the gassing of Jews and other prisoners. “I ask for forgiveness. I share morally in the guilt but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide.”

Prosecutors argued that Groening’s financial role in Auschwitz’s operations made him complicit in the murders carried out in the camp. “By sorting the bank notes he helped the Nazi regime to benefit economically,” Jens Lehmann, a lawyer for the group of Auschwitz survivors and relatives of victims who are joint plaintiffs in the case, told Reuters.

On the first day of the trial, Groening described watching as Jewish prisoners were herded off the trains. One SS soldier, he said, grabbed a crying baby and slammed its head against a truck until it went silent. “I was so shaken. I don’t find what he did good at all,” Groening said.

He also witnessed naked Jews herded into a converted farmhouse in late 1942. When the doors closed, a soldier opened a can of gas and poured its contents down a hatch. “The screams became louder and more desperate but after a short time they became quieter again,” Groening said. “This is the only time I participated in a gassing,” he added, before correcting himself, “I don’t mean participated, I mean observed.”

At one point in the trial, he denied playing a direct role in the genocide; however, he admitted, that he had participated in the selection process a handful of times. He claimed he had asked to be transferred, but, ultimately, he admitted his guilt. At one point, he asked for forgiveness and told the judges, “I share morally in the guilt, but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide.”

During another part of the trial, his admission was more explicit. “I am aware that my role in the prisoners' property department in Auschwitz has made me complicit in the Holocaust,” he said, “even if my part in it was small.”

“At the heart of the case,” according to the Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan, “was the controversial question of whether people like Groening who were “cogs” in the Nazi machinery, but did not actively participate in killings are guilty of a crime. The answer used to be ‘no,’ but the 2011 conviction of concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk as an accessory to mass murder emboldened German prosecutors, who decided to pursue a case against Groening.”

On July 15, 2015, after a three-month the trial, the 94-year-old Groening was convicted of being an accessory to 300,000 murders and sentenced to four years in prison, six months longer than prosecutors had requested. The German Federal Court of Justice rejected a subsequent appeal on his behalf on November 28, 2016.

The German government has shifted its focus from prosecuting high-level criminals to second-tier suspects who were guards or played other roles in the torture and murder of innocents during the war. Few of the Nazi perpetrators are still alive; however, so the trial of Groening may be one of the last, meaning that only a tiny fraction of the men and women responsible for the Holocaust will have ever faced justice. In the case of Auschwitz, for example, fewer than 1,200 of the 8,000 men and 200 women who played a role in the camp were brought to trial.

Groening died at age 96 on March 12, 2018.  

Sources: Sarah Kaplan, ‘Accountant of Auschwitz’ sentenced to four years in prison for 300,000 deaths, Washington Post, (July 15, 2015);
Richard Ferrer, “‘Accountant of Auschwitz’ Trial Spectacle Sends Message to Future Generations,” theAlgemeiner, (April 21, 2015);
Rose Troup Buchanan, “Oskar Groening trial: 'Accountant of Auschwitz' admits guilt in second statement to court,” The Independent;
“Oskar Gröning,” Wikipedia, accessed February 10, 2017;