Defense seeks acquittal for ex-Nazi guard, 94, as verdict looms
BERLIN -- A lawyer for a 94-year-old former SS sergeant who served at the Auschwitz death camp urged a German court Tuesday to acquit his client of charges that he was an accessory to murder.
Defendant Oskar Groening has testified that he guarded prisoners' baggage after they arrived at Auschwitz and collected money stolen from them. Prosecutors say that amounts to helping the death camp function.
Defense lawyer Hans Holtermann, however, said in his closing arguments that as far as the law is concerned Groening did not facilitate mass murder, news agency dpa reported.
The state court in Lueneburg, in northern Germany, plans to issue its verdict on Wednesday.
Groening said when his trial opened in April that he bears a share of the moral guilt for atrocities at the camp but that it was up to judges to determine whether he is guilty under criminal law.
Groening is accused of helping Auschwitz function in his job at the camp for which the German press has dubbed him the "Accountant of Auschwitz." He guarded prisoners' baggage on the ramps, but his main task was to collect and tally money stolen from the new arrivals and then send it to Berlin.
Oskar Groening is being tried on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, related to a period between May and July 1944 when hundreds of thousands Jews from Hungary were brought to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Nazi-occupied Poland. Most were immediately gassed to death.
If convicted, Groening could get from three to 15 years in prison. Prosecutors have asked for 3 ½ years, but recommended that 14 to 22 months be deducted from his sentence because it took so long to bring him to trial. Groening was previously investigated in the 1970s but authorities then shelved the case.
Another defense lawyer, Susanne Frangenberg, called for Groening not to be punished if he is convicted. She pointed to the delay in bringing him to trial and to his openness about his past, which is unusual for trials of former Nazi camp guards.
Groening has told the Lueneburg state court in a statement read by his attorney that it was hard today to understand the blind obedience he had to the Nazi system even when witnessing the terrible atrocities perpetrated at the death camp in German-occupied Poland.
"There was a self-denial in me that today I find impossible to explain," Groening said, the dpa news agency reported. "Perhaps it was also the convenience of obedience with which we were brought up, which allowed no contradiction. This indoctrinated obedience prevented registering the daily atrocities as such and rebelling against them."
In his statement, Groening said even though he had known what was going on at Auschwitz, the personal stories of the co-plaintiffs during the trial had brought home the enormity of the atrocities.