The sad but important story of the last Nazi
He is a frail man, almost pitiful. He is 94 years old.
But Oskar Groening is larger than life to survivors of the Nazi death camps of the 1940s and symbolic of the genocide of millions of Jews under the Germany of Adolf Hitler.
Groening on Wednesday was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland in the latter days of World War II.
In Groening’s trial in Lueneburg, Auschwitz was referred to a “a murder machine.”
Known as the accountant of Auschwitz, Groening’s role was the seize and count the money and valuables from the new inmates. He was responsible for sending those valuables to a central hub in Berlin. Groening always referred to himself as a low-level cog in the machine. During the war he was a member of Hitler’s paramilitary organization, the SS, assigned to Auschwitz.
But no matter what, he is of the same cloth as Hermann Goering, Rudolpa Hess and Heinrich Himmler. We must remember this. He was referred to as a mere “minnow” in the operation, but he remains a war criminal who has admitted to be morally guilty of what happened at Auschwitz.
As the few remaining war criminals live out their lives, we must constantly remind ourselves about what happened to the Jews. Never again. Oskar Groening, yes, was a junior squad commander at the world’s most notorious death camp, but he was a war criminal. Say it again. He was a war criminal!
It is becoming likely that the Groening case may be the last war crimes trial of the Nazi era. The fact that Groening was even alive is remarkable.
The first trials at Nuremburg took place amid great fanfare in 1945-46 (the story was later fictionalized and appeared as a major motion picture). In the dock were names familiar to history — Goering, Hess, Doenitz, Speer, Keitel, Jodl. Big fish such as Goering, the no. 2 person in the Nazi underworld, got away by poisoning himself. But Hess served for a number of years in an East German prison, all by himself.
In the early 1960s, Nazi hunters apprehended Adolf Eichmann and extradited him from South American to Israel. He was executed, perhaps the last giant figure in the genocide. Since then there have been sightings of ex-Nazis. But a lot of time has passed.
That’s why Groening’s case was so interesting.
Because of his advanced age, Groening may never serve his four-year sentence, but history did not forget about him.