Former Auschwitz book keeper (94 years old) is jailed for four years. Do you feel that this was the right punishment?

Well….I don’t know what the point is. To make sure he never does it again?

I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with the verdict honestly.

“Everyone who participated in it has to take responsibility for it,”

- I wonder how far this line of thought extends. Do we hold every single individual who wore a Nazi uniform and was stationed there accountable, no matter how far down the chain they were?

The point is not to make sure he never does it again but rather to make sure no one ever does it again. It’s hard to have sympathy for some one involved in Auschwitz. A million people died for no reason. The numbers are staggering.

I was reading some comments on another news sight and one person said something like “why not use him as an educator rather than just stick him in jail to die?” Reading about this man he did seem to be one of the ones that regrets his involvement as a young man and has been open about it in order to make people realise how horrific it was. Would sending him into schools to talk about this be a better way of preventing it from happening again? It says in this article that he has been open about his involvement in order to silence holocaust deniers and I also read elsewhere (Huffington Post I think) that he handed himself over to the police.

Just reading the article gave me a bit of a panic attack. He knew what was happening and that it was wrong. His job was to confiscate and keep the money and belongings of prisoners. Even if he wasn’t guilty of the actual murders, he is at the minimum guilty of stealing. Even if it was his job, he could have fled the country if he was opposed to doing his job. Although the article does not say how he felt at the time he was doing it.
I agree with the sentence. Let every criminal be aware there is no time limit to be convicted of past deeds.

WRONG, but then emotions always seem to short circuit good logic.

The whole Social Nationalism move was a nightmare for just about everyone involved in it. There are those that embraced it and those that joined it out of survival. Then there are the vast majority that suffered from its consequences.

I don’t know if four years in prison is the right punishment. If he was given a fair trial based upon current laws of Germany and the ability of a qualified defense lawyer, then there is an argument to support the verdict.

From what I’ve read about Oskar Gröning, he felt that his only choices were to accept or deny the role he eventually played, much like others during the Nazi regime. The fact that he eventually came out to confront those that consider the Holocaust a myth is important.

Gröning was an accomplice in a horrific move. That is the path he chose. Was it based upon survival instincts or because he believed in the National Society’s propganda?

I have a feeling that most of those coherence into the movement, did so under threat to them and their families.

Just a thought. If we were talking about participants in ISIS, would the question of whether they were coherced or manipulated come into play when punishing them?

I find it slightly ridiculous that it happened 73 years ago and that Gröning was speaking about it openly and on film at least 10 years ago. Why now?

However if Leon Schwarzbaum – Auschwitz survivor of the same age as Gröning – considers it fair punishment, who am I to disagree?
I don’t consider myself smarter than the entire German law system, but I do think @OpryLeigh‘s alternative sentencing has merit.

What goes around, comes around, correct on general principle alone.

Is the guy unhappy about it?

I recall reading about him, and he was very committed to full and honest disclosure of the horror of the Holocaust.

A real hero does the right thing knowing the consequences can be harsh.

OK, that sounds weird calling a Nazi a hero, but I think you will understand. He is honestly working to make a positive contribution to the world.

I don’t quite know what to think. On the one hand a case can be made for the argument that anyone knowingly facilitating the camps and their operation is culpable. But I know for a fact that had I been a 22 year old German and given the choice between a desk job ANYWHERE or frontline service in Russia, I would surely pick the former. It’s fortunate that participants in the horrors of the camps must soon be dead. After all, the locomotive engineers and every one of the thousands of railway workers delivering those millions to the ovens with clockwork German efficiency, the people who proudly designed and manufactured the “showers”, metallurgists converting fillings and teeth to ingots, where does it stop?

It’s not like he’s going to be in a Russian Gulag or an American high security prison. My guess is that for him, being in prison won’t be too different from being in just about any lower budget nursing home. The food will probably slightly crappier for him, but everything else will be the same. It’s more of a token punishment than anything else.

The timing does seem weird, but if he knew what was going on then I think that’s sufficient to merit punishment.

I wonder if he’ll really do any jail time at all, if it was just for show.

There is no “statute of limitations” for the kind of satanic crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, no matter how old one is, no longer how long ago he committed them. And while four years sounds to me a woefully short sentence, it’s essentially a death sentence for a 94-year old man—a punishment that in my opinion still doesn’t come close to fitting his crimes. And by the way, I can never accept that “following orders” to commit murder, mass or otherwise, can ever be a legitimate excuse for doing so.

But how far would you go to protect your children, your family, @Pachy? We don’t really know what he was up against.

@Dutchess_III—I read his bio in Wikipedia:. He wasn’t protecting his children or family. He signed up with the Nazis initially because he thought they were good for Germany. He did request to leave Auschwitz a few times, but each time he was denied transfer, he just went back to work and tried to distance himself from directly seeing the atrocities.

There are a number of things which I found really odd about the case. I assumed that perhaps he was on the run, living in Argentina or something—as many SS men were found in the 70s and 80s hiding out there. But he’s been in plain sight in Germany this entire time. He even served as a witness to the prosecution of another SS officer in the past.

If he was such a criminal, why wait all these years when he was in plain sight, living out in the open in Germany? Why wait 70+ years? Why didn’t they put him on trial after he testified against the other officer many years ago?

I think he got put on trial simply because he was one of the very last Nazis alive. He wasn’t seen as a threat and hasn’t been in hiding at all. If he really were that important, he would have been in prison decades ago.

@keobooks

Pretty much. This could well be the last chance they have to prosecute any former Nazis, so I think they pushed the case now just on that alone.

“Is it safe?”

Well that…wow. Thanks for the extra info @keobooks.

I don’t know what to think. It’s a shame they waited so long to put him in jail. If he had been jailed in his youth maybe it would have made more sense. Sense for the families still mourning and the people who had lived through the hell, and sense for the man himself to feel he had received a punishment for his crimes.

From what I understand some Jews had to make the choice to “help” the Nazis in the camps to save their own lives.

My question always is, did that soldier believe in the cause? Sorry, but I do think there were plenty of Germans at the time who wanted to kill Jews and people who were handicapped and anyone who was deemed sub par. I don’t think the majority of Germans felt this way, but enough that it counts. The same as slave owners in America, especially those who saw fit to rape, physically abuse, and murder their slaves.

I think the point @janbb asked about ISIS is a very interesting thing to ponder. I’m never sure exactly what I think about young men who have been brainwashed and manipulated to do horrific things. I’m still for punishing them, but I have a mini space where I feel they didn’t have a good chance to be better people.

What about our military when we invaded Iraq? Should soldiers have refused to fight? Many of them believed Sudam was somehow connected to 9/11 out of ignorance. Even some soldiers who didn’t agree with fighting in Iraq fought for us there.

I don’t mind that the bookkeeper is jailed, but it’s awfully late, and I wish his knowledge and regret had been utilized in a more useful manner.

He couldn’t have been jailed in his youth, @JLeslie.

@Dutchess_III Why not?

No one has mentioned this episode of Deep Space Nine It’s one of my favorites. Its what I first thought of when I heard about the case.

At 94 he has pretty much beaten the human statistical standards for longevity. The sentence is symbolic.

Justice, in the moral sense, is eternal. The fact that few people know from personal experience what Auschwitz really was, and the fact that to later generations it is a sort of historical rumor, does not mitigate the seriousness of his involvement.

He has had a long life without having to confront his complicity with the evil Nazis.

So now he will.

Too bad. Fuck him

Because he was working for the Nazi’s in his youth. We were fighting them, not wandering around arresting Germans, unless they ended up POW’s.

I think this is fucking stupid and a waste of resources. If anything his sentence should be used as an example of what a vengeful and feel-good group of herd mentality people we are. This is symbolic and frankly makes us more like the Germans were at the time. At 94 does he even know where the hell he is? If so I’d say any price there was to be paid has been done so in regret. Many Germans had little choice in their unfortunate situation during the Nazi reign. If that’s not the case what difference does jailing a 94 year old sociopath make? Dumb, Dumb Dumb. Let’s not even speak of what us Americans have become complacent with either.

The punishment doesn’t sit quite right with me. Is this how the Holocaust ends, with an old man dying in gaol? He wasn’t even necessarily a cruel man. There will be no more justice for those that were murdered, in future all we will be able to do is to remember. It would be more fitting if he devoted all his remaining days to keeping that memory alive.

@Dutchess_III I think he was still in his youth in 1947, when he returned to Germany after the war.

I think the point of jail time is meaningless in 2015. I do believe he is culpable for his actions. They should have gave him house arrest.

@Durchess_III Basically, @keobooks answered it for me. They could have tried him 50–60 years ago.

I think he will get house arrest or a suspended sentence.

@keobooks Gröning was born in 1921. If his return to Germany was 1947, he was around 26 years old. That is adult age. The messages he was exposed to in his youth not only influenced him at the time, but were supported by those that he trusted. Haven’t you said the same thing when it comes to Christianity?

@JLeslie In a sense, they did. Gröning was taken prisoner by the British and temporarily put in a Nazi concentration camp before being moved to England as a prisoner of war. He was forced to do labor work albeit it, according to him, where he had “a very comfortable life.”

@Pied_Pfeffer then that’s enough for me at this point. It honestly tires my mind to think hard about punishing Nazis. I figure bunches of their soldiers, who actually did believe in the cause, and who killed people, never were brought up in any sort of charges.

If the Germans today were still fiercely antisemitic I probably would have more energy for punishing Nazis. Probably, if I had witnessed the horrors, or lost my own family members I might have more energy for it. I certainly identify with those Jews in that I always feel like antisemitism can rise again and definitely still exists to some extent.

I saw that on the news tonight! He looked about 18 or 19 in the picture when he was the bookkeeper. Wonder if he refused to do his job as a soldier which was bookkeeping, he probably would have been shot! It wasn’t this guys war, it was a war created by the Rothschilds, and now he is 94, what is the point. I am sure he has little time left on this earth as it is. So he was a soldier during the German war, a horrible situation for humanity, and now the cruelty is to wait all these years and make him go to jail at 94, whoever made that decision should be in jail with him. No it is wrong!! America brought Nazi Scientist Joseph Mengele her to start Operation Paperclip, and the mind control experiments and a sleuth of other scientist to do their evil deeds. Whose the good guy here? For Goodness Sakes!

@upyurts

While the US did recruit some German scientists after the war, Menegele was certainly not one of them. He spend his post WWII life in hiding in South America before drowning in Sao Paulo in the late 1970s.

And the Rothschilds started WWII? Let me guess – as part of the global Zionist conspiracy, right?

@Pied_Pfeffer 26 is still a hell of a lot younger than 94.

Well, I guess he was at the bottom of the list. It is strange, though, that they waited all of this time. The time for punishment has come and gone.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that he has a terminal illness. There may have been a ‘gentleman’s agreement that, while he would eventually have to be tried, the government would basically let him choose the timing, in exchange for testimony and eyewitness accounts on atrocities.

There’s no logical reasoning for the timing, given that he was admitting involvement at least 10 years ago on film.

Yes, I do wonder if he’s in on his own arrest. Maybe the chance to bring the holocaust back into relief, one last time.

OK, I looked up a New Yorker article that made me think Oskar Gröning has been working for good.

Upset by Holocaust denial, he has been speaking out since the 1980s so people know the truth. He self-published his story, and he has given extensive interviews in Germany and the UK.

[Gröning ] got to know a fellow stamp collector who, it turned out, was a Holocaust denier. The collector gave him a pamphlet called “The Auschwitz Lie.” Gröning felt compelled to point out that the supposed “lies” were true; all the horrors that were said to have taken place at Auschwitz had indeed happened. He should know, since he was there. Gröning sent the pamphlet back to the collector, with his comments. A few months later, the comments appeared as a letter to the editor in an extreme right-wing magazine. Gröning, the onetime Nazi, began getting phone calls from incensed neo-Nazis…

Gröning set out to write a chronicle of what he had seen. He had copies of the manuscript bound and gave them to his sons…He continued to revise the manuscript for twenty years. Meanwhile, in 2003, and then again in 2004, he sat for lengthy interviews with the BBC. In 2005, he gave another long interview, stretching over more than five hours, to the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The New Yorker – February 16, 2015

There have been other elderly Nazis who have been tried in recent years.

This is sooooooooo stupid. We do not even bother to go back and locate and try Klansman who did their murderous dirt during peace time, and not during wartime. To bother him after all this time for things of war just to feel better about justice being done is sooooooo stupid.

I don’t think the Germans will spend their time prosecuting American Klansman if they leave the old Nazis alone.

@Hypocrisy_Central

That would maybe be sort of a vague point if we were the ones prosecuting him. We aren’t. Germany is. I don’t think it’s really Germany’s responsibility to prosecute Klansmen.

^ It was an illustration of stupid parallels. They want to slam the old guy for things that happened in war when he was a soldier under orders, and it was war time. We in the US by contrast was not in a war, Klansman were not under orders of generals, and such and there is no statute of limitations on murder so they could, technically, hunt down Klansman if they wanted but they figure it is so far back, those who could be tried for murder it is not really cost effective to do so.

@Hypocrisy_Central

Indeed, it was a stupid parallel.

there is no statute of limitations on murder so they could, technically, hunt down Klansman

Klansmen have been convicted decades after their crimes. Is there some case you know where someone can be prosecuted for murder today?

You really should let the authorities know. It’s not good to withhold information like that.

Just to cut through the (it’s certainly not English as we know it) gibberish: Edgar Ray Killen, convicted in 1964 killings of 3 civil-rights workers in Mississippi, speaks out for first time since 2005 trial.

I get a bit steamed that there are corporations that collaborated with the Nazis and never had to pay reparations or answer to their crimes. Much easier to toss some old filing clerk in prison than to do something that would actually make a difference.