Oskar Gröning (10 June 1921 – 9 March 2018)[1] was a German SS Unterscharführer who was stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning surrendered to the British at the end of the war; his role in the SS was not discovered.

In September 2014, Gröning was charged by German prosecutors as an accessory to murder in 300,000 cases, for his role at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

[3] Gröning was born in June 1921,[4] in Nienburg in what was then Prussia (today in Lower Saxony), the son of a skilled textile worker.

[6] Gröning was fascinated by military uniforms, and one of his earliest memories was 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.

[5]: 139  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.

[5]: 140  This allowed the remaining trainees to further their banking careers in a relatively short time; however, despite these opportunities, Gröning and his colleagues were inspired by Germany's quick victories in France and Poland and wanted to contribute.

The task was top secret: Gröning and his fellow SS men had to sign a declaration that they would not disclose it to family or friends, or people not in their unit.

[5]: 141  Once this had concluded, they were split into smaller groups and taken to various Berlin stations where they boarded a train in the direction of Katowice with orders to report to the commandant of Auschwitz, a place Gröning had not heard of before.

[5]: 142  When he inquired further, his colleagues confirmed that the Jews were being systematically exterminated and that this had included the transport of prisoners who had arrived the previous night.

[6]After witnessing this, Gröning claimed, he went to his boss and told him that he could not work at Auschwitz anymore, stating that if the extermination of the Jews is necessary, "then at least it should be done within a certain framework".

[5]: 138  Gröning claims that his superior officer denied this request citing a document he had signed before being posted, forcing him to continue his work.

[5]: 167  When his group arrived at the extermination area of the camp they saw a farmhouse, in front of which were SS men and the bodies of seven or eight prisoners who had been caught and shot.

They watched as an SS man put on a gas mask and emptied a tin of Zyklon B into a hatch in the cottage wall.

[5]: 287 He realised that declaring "involvement in the concentration camp of Auschwitz would have a negative response", and so tried not to draw attention to it, putting on the form given to him by the British that he worked for the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt instead.

[5]: 287  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.

[6] A keen stamp collector, he was once at his local philately club's annual meeting, more than 40 years after the war, when he fell into a conversation about politics with the man next to him.

[5]: 300  The man told him it was "terrible" that Holocaust denial was illegal in Germany, and went on to tell Gröning how so many bodies could not have been burnt, and that the volume of gas that was supposed to have been used would have killed all living things in the vicinity.

[6]Gröning then began receiving phone calls and letters from strangers who tried to tell him Auschwitz was not actually a place for exterminating human beings in gas chambers.

"[5]: 300 As a result of such comments, Gröning decided to speak openly about his experiences, and publicly denounce people who maintain the events he witnessed never happened.

[6] Citing his summons to testify against a member of the SS accused of murdering prisoners at Auschwitz, he also said he was innocent in the eyes of the law, pointing to the fact that he spoke as a witness and not as a defendant.

[6] In the BBC book and DVD set Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution', author Laurence Rees indicates that although Gröning had requested to leave Auschwitz after he witnessed killings, his objection was only on the basis of its practical implementation, and not on the general militaristic principle of the mass extermination of enemies.

[5]: 139  Gröning said that he thought at the time that it was justified due to all the Nazi propaganda he had been subjected to, in that Germany's enemies were being destroyed,[5]: 139  which to him made the tools of their destruction (such as gas chambers) of no particular significance.

[8] 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.

[9] 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.

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.

[13] 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.