Oskar Groening

Gröning was born in June 1921, in Lower Saxony, the son of a skilled textile worker. His mother died when he was four. His father, a nationalist and strict conservative, joined Der Stahlhelm after Germany's defeat in the First World War (during which his father had lost an eye), and his father's anger at how Germany had been treated following the Treaty of Versailles increased as his textile business went bankrupt in 1929 due to insufficient capital.

Gröning wanted to join an elite army unit and set his sights on joining the Schutzstaffel. Without his father's knowledge, he did so in 1940 at a hotel where the SS was recruiting. Gröning said that his father was disappointed to learn this when he came home after having joined.

Gröning's application to transfer to a unit on the front-line was successful, and in 1944 he joined an SS unit fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. He was wounded and sent to a field hospital before rejoining his unit, which eventually surrendered to the British Army.

That same day, Ivor Perl, an 83-year-old Briton who was born in Hungary into a religious Jewish family, also gave evidence; Perl testified that he was 12 years old when he arrived at Auschwitz and that he and his brother lost their parents and seven siblings in the Holocaust. In July, Irene Weiss, an 84-year-old survivor from the United States, testified that her family was torn apart on arrival at Auschwitz in May 1944, during the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews and that she had lost both her parents, four siblings and 13 cousins at Auschwitz.

Gröning and the rest of his SS colleagues were imprisoned in an old Nazi concentration camp. He was later sent to the UK as a forced labourer in 1946 where he had a "very comfortable life". He ate good food and earned money, and travelled through the Midlands and Scotland giving concerts for four months, singing German hymns and traditional English folk songs to appreciative British audiences.

Gröning was released and returned to Germany in 1947 or 1948. Upon being reunited with his wife, he said: "Girl, do both of us a favour: don't ask." He was unable to regain his job at the bank due to having been a member of the SS, so he got a job at a glass factory, working his way up to a management position. He became head of personnel, and was made an honorary judge (a sort of juror) of industrial tribunal cases.

Gröning stated that his childhood had been one of "discipline, obedience and authority". Gröning was fascinated by military uniforms, and one of his earliest memories is of looking at photos of his grandfather, who served in an elite regiment of the Duchy of Brunswick, on his horse and playing his trumpet. He told Der Spiegel in 2005, that as a child, he played marbles in the street with Anne Selig, the daughter of a Jewish ironmonger whose store was next to his home. When Nazi storm troopers held up a sign outside the shop saying, "Germans, do not buy from Jews," he said, he was unmoved. He joined the Scharnhorst, the Stahlhelm's youth organisation as a small boy in the 1930s, and later the Hitler Youth when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Influenced by his family's values, he felt that Nazism was advantageous to Germany and believed that the Nazis "were the people who wanted the best for Germany and who did something about it." He participated in the burning of books written by Jews and other authors that the Nazis considered degenerate in the belief that he was helping Germany free itself from an alien culture, and considered that National Socialism was having a positive effect on the economy, pointing to lower unemployment.

Gröning's prosecution has been reported to have been a part of Germany's final effort to bring the last Nazi war-crimes suspects to justice. State prosecutors managed to charge the defendant on a legal precedent set in 2011 by the conviction of the former Sobibor extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk by a court in Munich for his presence as a guard at the camp rather than for a specific act of murder.

In September 2014, it was reported that Gröning, then aged 93, had been charged by state prosecutors with having been an accessory to murder for his role at Auschwitz receiving and processing prisoners and their personal belongings. The indictment stated that Gröning economically advanced Nazi Germany and aided the systematic killing of 300,000 of the 425,000 Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz by 137 railway transports during the summer of 1944.

The trial commenced on 20 April 2015 at Lüneburg Regional Court (Landgericht). In an opening statement, Gröning asked for forgiveness for his mainly clerical role at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, by saying: "For me there's no question that I share moral guilt", the 93-year-old told the judges, acknowledging he knew about the gassing of Jews and other prisoners. "I ask for forgiveness. I share morally in the guilt but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide."

Eva Mozes Kor, who was 10 years old when she arrived at Auschwitz, testified that she and her twin sister were used for the cruel medical experiments conducted by Josef Mengele and that she had lost her parents and older sisters in Auschwitz. Kor conversed with and embraced the defendant after giving evidence, while other Holocaust survivors in the courtroom protested against this gesture. Another witness, Max Eisen, who was 15 years old at the time of entry into Auschwitz, described the brutality of the extermination part of the camp, including extracting gold teeth from dead victims. On 12 May 2015, Susan Pollack, an 84-year-old Briton, gave evidence of how she was taken from Hungary to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; describing the living conditions encountered at Auschwitz, she said: "I was in a barrack with about 800 other girls ... we were losing weight, we weren't able to use our minds anymore".

On 15 July 2015, he was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews. Reacting to the sentence, Auschwitz survivor Kor said that she was "disappointed" adding: "They are trying to teach a lesson that if you commit such a crime, you will be punished. But I do not think the court has acted properly in sentencing him to four years in jail. It is too late for that kind of sentence ... My preference would have been to sentence him to community service by speaking out against neo-Nazis. I would like the court to prove to me, a survivor, how four years in jail will benefit anybody." Gröning's defence lawyer, Hans Holtermann, was quoted as saying that he would review the verdict before deciding whether to appeal.

On 28 November 2016, the appeal was declined by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH). In August 2017, Gröning was judged to be fit for prison. An appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court also failed. The latter court ruled his age was not a valid reason not to send him to jail.

On 15 January 2018, Gröning applied for pardon as a last measure to avoid imprisonment. The pardon was rejected.

On 9 March 2018, Gröning died while hospitalized before he was to begin his sentence. He was 96.