‘Bookkeeper Of Auschwitz’ Makes Last-Ditch Bid To Avoid Jail

A 96-year-old former guard at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp has asked German authorities not to jail him, despite losing a court challenge against his sentence.

Oskar Groening has filed a formal “request for mercy” with prosecutors in the northern city Lueneburg, a spokesman for the justice ministry in Lower Saxony state told AFP on Monday.

Germany’s constitutional court ruled in late December that the former SS man must serve out his four-year sentence as an accessory to the murders of 300,000 people at the death camp, rejecting defenders’ argument that imprisonment at such an advanced age would violate his “right to life”.

Prosecutors will rule “in the coming days” on Groening’s application for mercy — a peculiarity of German law that can exceptionally allow sentences to be commuted or cancelled altogether — broadcaster NDR reported.

There will be “no delaying effect” on the start of the convict’s jail term in the meantime, the justice ministry spokesman said.

Former guard Groening became known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” for his role as an accountant, sorting and counting money collected from people killed or used as slave labour.

He confessed his “moral guilt” in court ahead of his 2015 conviction and repeatedly expressed remorse for his actions.

More than a million European Jews were killed at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland before it was liberated by Soviet forces.

Fewer than 50 of its 6,500 SS personnel who survived the war were ever convicted.

But German courts have scrambled to deal with cases against elderly surviving Holocaust perpetrators, after a 2011 ruling set a precedent for convicting people based on the fact they worked at death camps.

AFP