Oskar Groening, former Auschwitz guard, found guilty in Germany

A 94-year-old German man who worked as a bookkeeper at Auschwitz was sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the murder of 300,000 people at the death camp, in what could be one of the last big Holocaust trials.

Betraying little emotion, white-haired Oskar Groening sat with his arms crossed, looking around the court room while the judge explained the verdict.

After the hearing, he shuffled out of court, hunched over a walking frame with his head bowed. He remains free until a decision on whether and how much of his jail time he will have to serve.

• Auschwitz convictions have been few and far between

Groening did not kill anyone himself while working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, but by sorting bank notes seized from trainloads of arriving Jews he helped support the regime responsible for mass murder, prosecutors had argued.

"Justice has to be done, even if it's too late," said Canadian Auschwitz survivor Hedy Bohm, who testified at Groening's trial. 

Bohm was 16 when the Nazis sent her and her parents from Hungary to Auschwitz in May 1944. Her parents are believed to have been killed in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. 

Bohm, 87, now lives in Toronto, where she moved after the war. Speaking about the four-year sentence handed to Groening, Bohm said: "Personally it doesn't mean anything to me, it's that he's convicted."

"Maybe he will find peace now that he's faced the consequences of his actions," she said.

Groening's trial went to the heart of the question of whether people who were minor participants in the Nazi regime, but did not actively participate in the killing of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, were guilty of crimes.

At the end of the roughly three-month trial, the judge said Groening had lived in peace and quiet since the end of the war, going unpunished for "an unfathomable crime".

"Mr. Groening is not a monster," said Judge Franz Kompisch, adding that he had taken an easier path by avoiding fighting at the front. "You chose the safe desk job," he told the accused.

"What you consider to be moral guilt and what you depict as being a cog in the wheel is exactly what lawmakers view as being an accessory to murder," said Kompisch.

The now frail Groening has admitted moral guilt but said it was up to the court to decide whether he was legally guilty. He said earlier this month he could only ask God to forgive him as he was not entitled to ask this of victims of the Holocaust.

Reasoning behind the prison term

Groening had argued he was not directly responsible for the deaths. However, the judge sided with the prosecution's contention that he was "guilty in law" for being a part of the Nazi machine.

One of his defence lawyers, Susanne Frangenberg, had argued: "Mr. Groening's role at Auschwitz was minor."

She added the court should commute his sentence if convicted, because he was repeatedly investigated since the 1970s. Also, his failing health and willingness to testify — unlike many other defendants — should be taken into account by the judge in his ruling, Frangenberg had said.

Another lawyer representing Groening, Hans Holtermann, said this week: "Mr. Groening was never an accessory to the Holocaust, neither with his presence at the ramp nor by transferring and counting money nor with any other actions, at least not in any legal sense."

A lawyer representing more than a dozen Holocaust survivors, Markus Goldbach, said a jail sentence would have a "symbolic effect," and that's adequate reasoning for the court to hand out more than the 3.5-year year term the prosecution was seeking.

Another lawyer for the co-plaintiffs, Stefan Lode, had given credit to Groening for being candid about his time at Auschwitz. "It should be viewed in his favour that he faced up to the proceedings of a trial," he said.

Jewish groups welcomed the verdict.

"Albeit belatedly, justice has been done," said World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder in a statement. "Mr. Groening was only a small cog in the Nazi death machine but without the actions of people like him, the mass murder of millions of Jews and others would not have been possible."

A lawyer for some of the co-plaintiffs said he was "relieved and happy" about the conviction and that the length of any jail term was not important to his clients.

Canadian co-plaintiffs

Montrealer Elaine Kalman Naves, who testified at the trial in April, was one of 23 Canadian co-plaintiffs in the landmark trial of the former Auschwitz guard.

• Canadians co-plaintiffs in trial of ex-Auschwitz guard accused as accessory in 300K murders
• Montreal woman to testify at Oskar Groening trial in Germany

Her half-sister, Évike Weinberger, was killed at the concentration camp at the age of six. Her father once made a tally and could name 84 direct and extended family members who died in the Holocaust.

"Évike went into the gas chamber immediately when she arrived at Auschwitz," she told CBC prior to her testimony. 

"That was part of Mr. Groening's duties and the duties of the guards who guarded the train platform — to preserve as much order as possible at the arrival so that people could be sorted very quickly and sent to their destinations."

Collected deportees' belongings

If Groening decides not to appeal, the verdict takes legal effect and then prosecutors decide when, whether and where Groening would actually go to jail, a court spokeswoman said.

During his time at Auschwitz, Groening's job was to collect the belongings of deportees after they arrived at the camp by train and had been put through a selection process that resulted in many being sent directly to the gas chambers.

Groening, who was 21 and by his own admission an enthusiastic Nazi when he was sent to work at the camp in 1942, inspected people's luggage, removing and counting any bank notes that were inside and sending them on to SS offices in Berlin, where they helped to fund the Nazi war effort.

The charges against him related to the period between May and July 1944 when 137 trains carrying roughly 425,000 Jews from Hungary arrived in Auschwitz. At least 300,000 of them were sent straight to the gas chambers, the indictment said.

Many Germans are keen to draw a line under the Holocaust and seal the post-war democratic identity of their nation. Some find distasteful the pursuit of old men, often in poor health, for crimes committed more than 70 years ago.