This morning I was reminded of my younger self’s unbridled fury when I learned that 94-year-old Oskar Gröning, politely referred to as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” (aka the bastard who robbed innocent, terrified people of all their cash and worldly goods), has been sentenced to four years in prison for being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews.  Oskar Gröning, arriving in court in Lüneburg  All I can say is my colleagues should be relieved that with age, I’ve learned how to control my temper because if I’d heard about such a paltry sentence when I was a teenager, I would have completely lost it.  Let’s briefly reflect upon a few important facts about the frail Gröning. He began his two-year stint at Auschwitz in 1942 at 21 years of age, pumped up from his time with Hitler Youth (during which he eagerly took part in burning books “written by Jews or other degenerates”, according to the historian Laurence Rees who has interviewed him at length).  Far from just being a backroom boy who pilfered booty from victims – taking what he fancied – prosecutors attested that they knew of at least three occasions he performed “ramp duty” – another neat phrase disguising the barbaric act of scraping people out of cattle cars into the camp, ready for selection and the gas chambers. And those are just the times they know about.  Oskar Gröning pictured during the war  A fragile Gröning has also spoken openly about how he witnessed an SS officer pick up a screaming baby left on Auschwitz’s platform by his foot and then beat it to death on the side of a truck.  I could go on but I won’t.  For these sorts of details, his defence lawyers have asked the public and the co-plaintiffs, the last Auschwitz survivors, to be grateful. We should apparently be happy that he is so willing to share the truth, as most of those men who’ve made it to the dock don’t. Unlike them, Gröning wants to help survivors bear witness and rail against Holocaust deniers.  And yet, I can’t quite summon those feelings – especially when I learn than this doddery old man never actually opposed killing the Jews. Instead he limply protested that more humane methods should be used.  The Auschwitz that Gröning and his cronies experienced – the one with a cinema, a theatre and a canteen was a very different place to the one where 1.1 million Europeans, mostly Jews, perished.  Thankfully my husband’s beautiful and stoic grandmother was not one of them. But her parents, grandparents, sisters, aunts, baby nieces and nephews all were. She herself, who passed away in 2008, managed to survive and walk to freedom with a bullet in her leg, after a trigger-happy German fired his gun at her during the camp’s liberation.  So what do her descendants and people like me make of today’s verdict? Well, we are quietly but firmly grateful. Grateful that we live in a society where civilisation and courtroom justice has triumphed over senseless barbarism and vengeance. And that regardless of age, you can never get away from the heinous crimes of your past.  Of course, the childish part of me is still silently seething. Gröning and Hitler’s other executioners don’t deserve to benefit from the civic values they worked so hard to dismantle. But at least today, some of the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust finally got to taste a sliver of justice, before there are no more characters left from the Nazi era, and the page is turned on one of humanity’s darkest chapters.
One of the last living Nazi guards, the so-called 'bookkeeper of Auschwitz',   has been sent to prison. Emma Barnett is grateful but her inner child   is seething