Washington: Oskar Groening, a German SS guard known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, who was convicted in 2015 of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews at the Nazi death camp during World War II, has died before he could serve a four-year prison sentence. He was 96.
A spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office in Hanover, Germany, told German news sources that Groening’s lawyer confirmed the March 9 death. No other details were disclosed.
After training as a bank clerk, Groening joined the Waffen SS, an elite paramilitary branch of Germany’s Nazi regime in 1939 when he was 18. He spent more than two years at Auschwitz, a death camp in occupied Poland, where more than 1 million people were killed during the war.
One of his jobs was to retrieve the luggage of Holocaust victims and confiscate their money. He recorded the amounts for the camp’s “foreign currency department,” carefully noting whether the cash came from France, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, the United States or other countries. He sent the money to SS headquarters in Berlin.
Read the article by Matt Schudel in the Sydney Morning Herald (from the Washington Post).