The "Small Cogs" in the Nazi Killing Camps

[packman]

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A 96-year-old former Nazi guard and SS officer known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” has been deemed fit to serve jail time for his 2015 conviction as an accessory to murder, German prosecutors say.

Kathrin Soefker, a spokeswoman for prosecutors in Hanover, northern Germany, said doctors had determined that Oskar Groening was well enough to start his four-year prison sentence, so long as he was able to receive “appropriate medical care” while incarcerated.

“A 96-year-old has physical constraints but … he is fit for prison,” Soefker said.

Groening’s lawyer, Hans Holtermann, said he disagreed with this assessment, telling Reuters news agency that his client would not be able to “survive imprisonment.”

Groening task at Auschwitz was sorting through the belongings of those unloaded from the trains and to account for those belongings - basically a bookkeeper. He was never directly involved in any of the murders of the prisoners, but he was witness to the hell that was Auschwitz and states ----

“For me there’s no question that I share moral guilt,” Groening, then 93, told judges during his 2015 trial. “I ask for forgiveness. I share morally in the guilt but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oskar-groening-fit-prison-nazi-auschwitz_us_5982c81de4b06d488874337b?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

[Girard442]

1. A major lesson not learned by most:

The people that made Nazi Germany work were, for the most part, ordinary and unremarkable.

[maveric]

2. And regardless of age, they need to pay for their atrocities.

re: Adolph Eichmann.

[COLGATE4]

3. Yes. 4 years isn't enough but he will probably die

while in prison. That'll work.