Auschwitz functionary jailed: Appropriate sentencing

THIS week a 94 year-old man was sent to jail for four years because of his complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz. Oskar Gröning, a former SS officer, was a bookkeeper who kept records of the personal belongings stolen from concentration camp inmates before they were murdered. 

As trains arrived at the Nazi death camp, a 21-year-old Gröning plundered suitcases to finance the Third Reich. He was so efficient that he was dubbed the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”.

In a Lüneburg courtroom, he made himself “morally culpable”. “I stand before the victims with remorse and humility and ask for forgiveness,” he said.

Because of his age, because he did not kill anyone, because he was no more than a functionary in an evil system, because Germany prosecuted so very few of these cases, it has been suggested that he should not be sent to jail.

To forgive is divine, to forget is even more difficult, but Gröning was an active and willing participant, one who never hid his anti-Semitism, in one of the greatest atrocities humanity has known. To suggest a sanction is unnecessary is as far off the mark as saying the IS drivers who brought caged captives to the place where they were burnt alive are not complicit. After all Gröning may in time, unlikely as that seems, recover his freedom — a hope that most of those he robbed at Auschwitz were denied in the most savage way.