Nazi sergeant recalls ‘orderly’ Auschwitz

A former SS sergeant has described in chilling detail how cattle cars full of Jews were brought to the Auschwitz death camp, the people stripped of their belongings, and then most led directly into gas chambers.

Oskar Groening is being tried on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, related to a period between May and July 1944 when around 425,000 Jews from Hungary were brought to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Poland and most immediately gassed to death.

During that period, so many trains were arriving that often two would have to wait with closed doors as the first was “processed”, Groening testified at the Lueneburg state court.