Germany’s recent criminal conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Gröning likely is one of the last trials of a Holocaust perpetrator. Serving from September 1942 through October 1944, defendant took cash and other tangible assets from incoming deportees before they were herded into the gas chambers. With no evidence of his direct personal involvement in the killings, he was found guilty as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews and sentenced to four years.1
It is particularly fitting that one of the last criminal trials stemming from the Holocaust involved a guard at Auschwitz, which “has become the symbol of the Holocaust.” It was the largest camp for exterminating Jews, where approximately one million were murdered, mostly in its gas chambers but also through starvation, disease, exposure and forced labor under brutal conditions. The time of defendant’s guard service included the period between March and June 1943 when the camp’s killing capacity greatly increased with four new gas chamber-crematorium complexes becoming operational.2
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