Court says 'bookkeeper of Auschwitz' physically fit to serve sentence





Hanover, Germany By Oliver Pietschmann,– A 96-year-old German man known as the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz" and convicted as an accessory to the murders of 300,000 people is physically able to serve his sentence, a court said Wednesday.

Oskar Groening cited his old age in an appeal against his four-year sentence, which was handed down by a regional court in northern Germany in 2015.



 
The motion was dismissed, the court said Wednesday. It declined to give details about when Groening would be required to begin his sentence.
Groening's lawyer Hans Holtermann told dpa that there were still measures that could be taken to stop his client from having to serve a sentence, including filing a complaint with the Constitutional Court.
Seven decades after the Holocaust, Groening's case marked the first time that the conviction of someone who acted as an accomplice at a death camp was upheld upon appeal.
More than 1 million people - the majority of them Jews - were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
At the age of 21, Groening volunteered to join the elite Waffen-SS before transferring in 1942 to work at Auschwitz, where he counted the money found among the belongings of prisoners and sent it to SS headquarters in Berlin.
A bank clerk in pre-war Germany, Groening never denied his Nazi past and accepted "moral responsibility" for the Holocaust on the first day of his trial.

Notepad


Wednesday, November 29th 2017
By Oliver Pietschmann,
           


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