This disturbs me a little and I wanted others' opinions. There is some information about his background in the NY Times article as well as on WikiPedia.
Based on his testimony, he joined the SS as a bookkeeper in 1940 but in 1942 was transferred to Auschwitz, after being sworn to secrecy and forced to sign a declaration stating the same. While at Auschwitz, he was responsible for sorting and counting currency taken from the prisoners and guarding their belonging until they could be sorted.
He witnessed the beating death of a baby who had been discarded by an incoming prisoner, after which he requested a transfer out of the camp, which was denied. He later witnessed about a dozen Jews who had tried to escape being gassed, after which he again requested a transfer, which was again denied.
I don't think that there was any evidence to suggest that he ever participated in the killing of any prisoners or the actual taking of their money and property. However, he was found to be complicit as a result of assisting the operation while knowing what was going on.
Does this seem a little tenuous? Couldn't the same argument be made about all of the Jews who survived by working in the camps?
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 60%. (I'm a bot)
> Oskar Groening, 96, was sentenced for being an accessory to murder in 2015, but never went to jail due to a series of appeals for clemency on grounds of old age and ill-health.
> Groening was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. He was accused of counting the cash found in the belongings of new arrivals at the camp and sending it to Nazi headquarters in Berlin.
> At least 1.1 million people were killed in the camps at Auschwitz, the vast majority of them Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide, but also Poles, gay people, disabled people and other persecuted minorities.
> For many years after the war, Groening worked as an accountant in a factory and suppressed what he had witnessed and participated in at Auschwitz.
> During his trial, Groening admitted that he was "Morally complicit" in the crimes but denied that he was legally guilty.
> The legal doctrine under which Nazis can be tried in Germany began to evolve with the conviction in 2011 of another convicted Nazi war criminal, John Demjanjuk, as an accessory to the murder of 28,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Poland.
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