LUENEBURG, Germany — Former SS Sgt. Oskar Groening told a German court Tuesday that he helped keep watch as thousands of Jews were led from cattle cars directly to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp where he served as a guard.
Groening, 93, is charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. As his trial opened, he said that he witnessed individual atrocities, but he did not acknowledge participating.
He recalled how a fellow guard discovered a baby abandoned among luggage and bashed it against a truck to stop its crying. After that, he unsuccessfully requested a transfer and started to drink vodka heavily to cope with working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, he said.
“I share morally in the guilt, but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide,” Groening told judges.
Under the German legal system, defendants do not enter formal pleas.
Groening testified in a lengthy statement to the court that he volunteered to join the SS in 1940 after working briefly at a bank and served at Auschwitz from 1942 to 1944.
Aside from helping on the ramp as transports of Jews arrived, Groening said his main task was to help collect and tally money as part of his job dealing with the belongings stolen from people arriving at Auschwitz — a job for which the German press has dubbed him the “Accountant of Auschwitz.”
Groening said the money was regularly sent back to Berlin. Pressed by presiding Judge Franz Kompisch, he said his view was that it belonged to the state.
“They didn’t need it anymore,” he said of the Jews from whom the money was taken — drawing gasps from Auschwitz survivors.
Groening, who is not in custody, entered the courtroom with the help of a walker. He was lucid as his testimony began but gradually lost focus, and Kompisch ended the session early. He is to question Groening further Wednesday.
The trial is the first to test a new line of German legal reasoning that has unleashed an 11th-hour wave of new investigations of Nazi suspects. Prosecutors argue that anyone who was a death camp guard can be charged as an accessory to murders committed there, even without evidence of involvement in a specific death.
There are 11 open investigations against former Auschwitz guards, and charges have been filed in three of those cases. Eight former Majdanek guards also are under investigation.
The charges against Groening relate to a period in May and June 1944 when some 425,000 Jews from Hungary were brought to Auschwitz and at least 300,000 almost immediately gassed to death.
“Through his job, the defendant supported the machinery of death,” prosecutor Jens Lehmann said.
Groening testified that he did not know what his duty would be until he arrived at Auschwitz but quickly learned that Jews were being selected for work and those who couldn’t work were being killed.
