A retired SS officer at Nazi death camp Auschwitz has finally confessed to his culpability, saying his role in the mass murder campaign of millions was morally corrupt -- and further warning Holocaust deniers they’re in the wrong too.
Assigned to the infamous concentration camp at the height of the Third Reich’s mainly Jewish pogrom, Oskar Groening was known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz.”
That’s because he was tasked with the duty of collecting money or other valuables from the discarded clothing and suitcases of those sent to the ovens.
Now Groening’s 93 and just one of only a few of the 6500 German Schutzstaffel officers who operated Auschwitz so *efficiently* to ever be brought to trial for the crimes against humanity committed there.
Over a million people were gassed or worked to death at the massive incarceration facility, for which the Bookkeeper today admitted his own “moral guilt” and begged “forgiveness.”
A bespectacled young man with a placid demeanor in 1942, there was nothing but an SS uniform and telltale tattoo that could belie Oskar Groening’s monstrous role in the systematic extermination of the Nazi death camp’s unfortunate inmates.
And, indeed, for decades following the defeat of Adolph Hitler he persistently and vehemently denied any role whatsoever in the shocking WWII atrocity.
But Oskar Groening has grown a conscience at last, and what’s more he wants those who argue that the Holocaust never occurred and is “just a conspiracy” to understand they’re dead wrong if they actually believe that.
“I was there,” Groening told a packed courtroom today. “"I want to tell those deniers I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the burning pits. And I want to assure you that these atrocities happened.”