The Bookkeeper of Auschwitz.

If I was to have any respect for anybody who took part in the Soha it would be Oskar Gröning. Had he not come forward to denounce the Holocaust deniers he may of lived the rest of his life without being put on trial. He didn't fain illness like John Demjanjuk as he had admitted a moral guilt but had said it was up to the courts to decide whether he was legally guilty. He said he could only ask God to forgive him as he was not able to ask this of victims of the Soha.

Was he guilty the simple answer is yes. He was aware where the money and jewellery came from which he counted for his masters and by his own omission due to lack of security he helped himself to money, Jewellery and food. Had he not been delivering money to his masters in Germany he would have been arrested for having his hand in the till and may of been shot or sent to the eastern front.

SS Unterscharführer ( a junior squad commander) Oskar Gröning did not kill anyone himself while working at Auschwitz-Birkenau the Nazi death camp, but prosecutors argued that by sorting the banknotes taken from the trainloads of people arriving he helped support a regime responsible for the mass murder. The trial went to the heart of the question of whether people who took part in the Nazi machinery, but did not actively participate in the killing of the Holocaust, were guilty of any crimes. The answer from the German justice system had been no for many years. Records show that 90% of serving SS were never prosecuted.

During his time at Auschwitz, Gröning’s job was to collect the belongings of the deportees after they arrived by train and had been put through a selection process that resulted in many being sent directly to the gas chambers within two hours of arriving. SS Unterscharführer Gröning, who was 21 at this time and by his own admission he was an enthusiastic Nazi when he was posted to work at Auschwitz in 1942, in his own words it was like a summer camp with good friends, he wasn't aware of the horrors that was to come, with a baby crying in a suitcase which did haunt him.

Prosecutors concentrated the charge on the period between May and July 1944, the time of the mass deportation of Hungary’s Jewish community during which 137 trains brought 425,000 people to Auschwitz, of which at least 300,000 were exterminated in the gas chambers within two hours of arriving. During that period guards worked around the clock as the trains rolled in, sometimes several at once, to ensure as many Jews were processed as quickly as possible due to Germany were losing the war and they wanted to remove as much evidence as possible.

In court in April, Gröning was pushed by a prosecutor to answer whether he knew what the SS stood for when he volunteered to join it. He replied: “It is hard to describe it to someone of your generation who was not there. It is simply inexplicable. As a young SS recruit, he recalled being assigned a special and secret task, and was called along with other young men to a marble-clad conference room in the heart of the Nazi power centre in Berlin to swear an oath of allegiance to the Third Reich.

“They told us that we had to sign up on the spot to certain obligations regarding tasks we would be given that would be unpleasant but that had to be done in order to ensure the final victory,” he said. But he insisted he had not known that Auschwitz was a death camp until after his arrival there in the autumn of 1942.

“I knew it was a place that I didn’t want to be, that made me scared, but I didn’t know why,” he said. On his first evening, he and the other SS newcomers had been plied with vodka by their superiors. It was revealed to them that some of the Jews arriving at Auschwitz were considered unsuitable for slave labour needed to be “disposed of”. “It completely shook me,” he said. “I had had five glasses of vodka and continued to think about it when I woke up next morning.” He claimed that a breakthrough moment when his “enthusiasm for Adolf” began to wane had come several weeks into his arrival when a crying baby was discovered hidden in one of the suitcases, most likely left by a mother who had hoped to prevent its death. He witnessed an SS guard pick the baby out and smash it against a lorry. “It was the worst moment of any I had experienced,” he said. “The next day I went to see my head of department and told him I wanted out of the whole business. My precise formulation was: ‘If things like that are always happening here, what a shitty dump this is, and I want out.” He succeeded in securing a transfer only after making his third application some time later.

The trial marks the second attempt to bring Gröning to court. An investigation that began in 1978 collapsed seven years later with prosecutors ruling that unless it could be proven that Gröning was directly responsible for the deaths of prisoners, he could not be put on trial. But since the 2012 conclusion of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Munich, in which judges ruled he was an accessory to mass murder simply by working at the Sobibor extermination camp, a change of practice has taken place, in which an individual’s mere presence at a concentration camp coupled with the knowledge they knew what was happening was sufficient to secure a conviction.

Oskar Gröning then a 94-year-old was convicted in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony on 15 July 2015 of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people and was sentenced to four years in prison. Oskar Groening asked the Justice Minister to pardon him so that he would not have to serve the sentence due to his waning ill health. Germany’s constitutional court, the country’s highest court, rejected Gröning's appeal, ruling that he could receive appropriate health care in prison, and that his jail sentence could be “interrupted” should there be a change in the nonagenarian’s health.

SS Unterscharführer Oskar Gröning had been captured by the British at the end of the war and temporarily imprisoned him in a former concentration camp. He was then shipped to England in 1946 where he became a forced labourer then judicial proceedings were dropped against the Germans to focus on the Cold War. During that time, and after earning 'good money', he joined a YMCA choir and travelled through the Midlands and Scotland giving concerts.

Oskar Groening died on the 9th March 2018 He had been personally forgiven by Eva Mozes Kor who had survived an experiment by SS Doctor Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz medical block 10. For more information please click her name above. Information on Wikipedia.

David Baddiel Joke: Some time after the war a holocaust survivor dies and goes to Heaven and god asked him, Tell me did you tell jokes while in the death camps? Yes of course we told jokes. god asked him to tell a holocaust joke, so he did. god said that's not funny! The survivor said "Well I guess you had to be there"

To watch David Baddiel exploring the multi-faceted nature of Holocaust denial in an attempt to understand what motivates this dangerous phenomenon and why it is on the rise. Only available in the UK via BBC red button