German court jails 94-year-old ‘Accountant of Auschwitz’ in one of last major Holocaust trials

A 94-year-old German man who worked as an accountant at the Auschwitz death camp was convicted on Wednesday of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people and sentenced to four years in prison, in what could be one of the last big Holocaust trials.

Oskar Groening did not kill anyone himself while working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, but prosecutors argued that by sorting the bank notes from trainloads of arriving Jews he helped support the regime responsible for mass murder.

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White-haired Groening, who has been on trial since April, has admitted moral guilt but said it was up to the court to decide whether he was legally guilty.

He said earlier this month he could only ask God to forgive him as he was not entitled to ask this of victims of the Holocaust.

The trial went to the heart of the question of whether people who were small cogs in the Nazi machinery, but did not actively participate in the killing of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, were guilty of crimes. Until recently, the answer from the German justice system was no.