Germany: Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder

A former SS guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland has been charged with with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Oskar Groening, 93, is accused of aiding in the extermination of 300,000 people in performing his role as a guard at the Nazi concentration camp between May and July 1944. Groening’s responsibilities included counting the banknotes of the estimated 425,000 people that were deported to the camp during that period and clearing away the belongings of those recently exterminated so that they would not alarm the new arrivals.

In a statement, state prosecutors in the German city of Hanover said:

“He helped the Nazi regime benefit economically, and supported the systematic killings”

Prosecutors claim that Groening was aware that those deemed unfit for work at the camp were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival at the camp.

A regional court will now decide whether the case will go to trial.

The case is being brought in the wake of a 2011 ruling by a Munich, which sentenced 90-year-old John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for his role as a Nazi guard at the Sobibor extermination camp. This ruling set a precedent that guards at camps could be tried for being complicit in the extermination of Jews, gypsies, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war despite no evidence that they were directly involved in the atrocities.

Following the 2011 ruling, files on 30 former Auschwitz Nazi personnel were sent to prosecutors by investigators examining evidence of Nazi war crimes with a recommendation to bring charges against them in 2013.