Ex-SS Man To Face Trial Over 300,000 Murders
Former Nazi officer Oskar Groening is charged over his role in the mass killing at the Auschwitz death camp.
15:03, UK,
Monday 02 February 2015
A 93-year-old former SS officer is to go on trial in Germany charged with taking part in the mass murder of at least 300,000 people at Auschwitz.
The German defendant, Oskar Groening, was known as the "bookkeeper" at the death camp.
He was tasked with counting the banknotes taken from prisoners and forwarding them to his Nazi masters in Berlin, according to prosecutors in Hanover.
He is also accused of helping to remove victims' luggage so they were not seen by new arrivals, and so covering up the traces of the mass killing.
Prosecutors said Groening was aware the predominantly Jewish prisoners deemed unfit to work "were murdered directly after their arrival in the gas chambers of Auschwitz".
He will appear in court on 21 April charged with at least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.
It relates to the 425,000 people believed to have been deported to the camp in occupied Poland between May and July 1944, at least 300,000 of whom died in the gas chambers.
John Demjanjuk, May 12, 2011
The Demjanjuk case led to the reopening of investigations into former Nazis
Fifty-five co-plaintiffs, mainly survivors and victims' relatives, will be represented at the trial, expected to be one of the last of its kind.
Groening told the German daily Bild in 2005 that he regretted working at Auschwitz, saying he still heard the screams from the gas chamber decades later.
Video: Auschwitz-Birkenau: A Hell On Earth
The renewed drive to bring to justice those accused of perpetrating the Holocaust follows a 2011 landmark court ruling.
For more than 60 years German courts had only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence showed they had personally committed atrocities.
But in 2011 a Munich court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for complicity in the extermination of Jews at the Sobibor camp, where he had served as a guard, establishing that all former camp guards can be tried.
About 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was operated by the Nazis from 1940 until it was liberated by Soviet forces on 27 January, 1945.
http://news.sky.com/story/1419819/ex-ss-man-to-face-trial-over-300000-murders
