Two Toronto Holocaust survivors who testified at the war crimes trial of Oskar Groening say they feel that justice has been served after the man known as the “Accountant of Auschwitz” was convicted on Wednesday.
“He’s been found guilty, so for me, that is a tremendous achievement,” said Hedy Bohm, 87, who was a teenager when she was sent to the death camp with thousands of other Jews.
Groening, 94, was sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the deaths of 300,000 Jews as a former SS sergeant during the Holocaust.
Max Eisen was 15 years old when he was sent to Auschwitz in 1944. His mother, sister, and two brothers were all killed in the gas chambers. Eisen doesn’t remember meeting the former guard, but knows he was there when Jews arrived at the death camp by train.
Groening’s role was to confiscate any valuable that could be put toward funding the Nazi war effort.
“He was in charge of all the loot they were going to gather,” Eisen said. “Every piece of bread had to be crumbled to piece to make sure that everything that was hidden was found. Tube of toothpaste slit open…currency was hidden in shoulder pads…and he was the one who collected all this.”
Earlier this year, Eisen and Bohm travelled to Germany to testify at Groening’s trial.
More than 70 years after the Holocaust, Eisen, 86, said seeing the former SS member in court was still a difficult experience.
“It was a shock to see him—to see an SS man was not a very pleasant situation for us,” he said.
Toronto Holocaust survivor Bill Glied was also at the trial to tell the story of how he lost his parents and sister at Auschwitz.
“(Groening) admitted he was involved in the murder of 340,000 people, including my family,” Glied said.
Groening confessed during his trial to feeling “moral guilt” for working at the death camp, but Eisen said he did not sense that Groening felt any remorse.
“We were hoping he would say that he felt guilty, but there was not a single bit of emotion,” Eisen said. “This man bought this Nazi supremacist ideology and he lives it to this very day.”
Groening’s lawyers argued that his role as a bookkeeper meant he did not have a direct hand in the genocide that took place at Auschwitz.
But German judge Franz Kompisch said Groening helped the camp run smoothly and willingly took a job in a system that was “inhumane and all bur unbearable for the human psyche.”
More than 170,000 people were investigated for Nazi war crimes between 1945 and 2005. More than 6,000 people have been convicted, but only a handful of them have served time in prison—leaving questions about whether Groening will actually serve any time of his four-year sentence.
For Bohm, however, the verdict against Groening is more important than the length of the sentence.
“Justice has been served,” she said. “I have no wish for him to sit in jail. That should have come 50, 60, or 70 years ago.”
“He lived a good life with his family, his children, and his career…which was taken away from most of us.”
But the verdict isn’t just important to those who were directly involved in the trial. The conviction also helps bring closure to the entire community of Holocaust survivors, said Alice Herscovitch of the Holocaust Memorial Institute in Montreal.
“Because there are so few perpetrators left, and they are still being pursued, it gives hope to survivors,” she said.
More than one million people died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945.
With a report from CTV Toronto’s Heather Wright
