94-Year-Old Former Auschwitz Guard jailed for FOUR YEARS for the murder of 300,000 Jews

The state court in the northern German city of Lueneburg gave Oskar Groening a four-year sentence
The sentence concludes a three month trial which has heard harrowing testimony from the victims of the Nazis' largest and most infamous death camp.Oskar Groening testified during his trial at the state court in Lueneburg, in northern Germany, that he guarded prisoners’ baggage after they arrived at Auschwitz and collected money stolen from them. Prosecutors said that amounted to helping the death camp function.

While none of the victims were able to recall seeing Groening at the camp, he was charged with being accessory to the killings because he was essential to the running of Auschwitz.
Groening never denied he had served at the camp, and accepted moral guilt for his crimes, but had denied criminal responsibility on the basis that he was not directly involved in the killings.

However the judge today swept that argument aside, handing Groening a sentence that means the Groening 94-year-old will likely die behind bars.
Judge Franz Kompisch told Groening he was 'guilty of accessory to murder in 300,000 legally connected cases' of Jews sent to the gas chambers from May to July 1944.
He said Groening had willingly taken a 'safe desk job' in 'a machinery designed entirely for the killing of humans', a system that was 'inhumane and all but unbearable for the human psyche'.

The court has been forced to sit for just three hours a day after Groening had to be taken to hospital midway through his trial, and has been carried into the courtroom at the start of each day.



As the proceedings concluded yesterday with the defence calling for an acquittal, Groening seized a last opportunity to address the judges.
Begging for mercy, he stated he was 'very sorry' for his time stationed at the Nazi death camp, adding: 'No one should have taken part in Auschwitz.'

'I know that. I sincerely regret not having lived up to this realisation earlier and more consistently. I am very sorry,' he said, his voice wavering.
Reacting to the verdict, Dr Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress, said: 'We welcome today's verdict and the historic significance of the trial of Oskar Groening, and the opportunity it provides for to educate a generation that is all too distant from the horrors of the Holocaust.