Lueneburg - A former SS guard delivered a courtroom apology to survivors of the Holocaust on Wednesday and said that only the “Lord God” could forgive him for his acknowledged complicity in the mass murder at the Nazi concentration camp.
Oskar Groening, 94, who was a guard at Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944, stands accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300 000 Hungarian Jews during 1944.
He is one of a handful of surviving Auschwitz guards that Germany is trying to prosecute.
But as his lawyer read out his statement expressing regret for his crimes at his trial in Lueneburg, northern Germany, on Wednesday, Mr Groening sat slumped and expressionless in his seat while Holocaust survivors and their relatives sat opposite him.
“I have consciously not asked to be forgiven for my guilt,” Mr Groening said in his declaration.
“Considering the scale of what happened at Auschwitz and the other crimes committed elsewhere, I am not entitled to make such a request. I can only ask the Lord God for forgiveness,” he added.
However, his statement failed to convince Holocaust survivors, including 84-year-old Irene Fogel Weiss, who lost her parents, four siblings and 13 cousins at Auschwitz.
“He is right to say that only the Lord God can forgive him,” Mrs Weiss said outside the court on Wednesday.
“I cannot myself. He was part of the machinery that murdered my family,” she added.
In a harrowing 15-minute statement, Mrs Weiss told the court how she was deported to Auschwitz with most of her family from Hungary in 1944.
The journey lasted days and the rail cattle wagon they travelled in was crowded with 100 passengers.
“We were relieved when we arrived at Auschwitz because we thought we were going to work,” Mrs Weiss told the court.
But the family was horribly mistaken.
She was separated from her parents and younger brothers as they descended on to the camp's selection ramp.
“I never saw them again,” Mrs Weiss said.
As she spoke, Mr Groening showed no emotion and just glanced at his watch.
Mrs Weiss recalled how she managed to survive because she was wearing a headscarf which convinced the SS guards that she was older than her 13 years and able to work.
Mrs Weiss survived Auschwitz by working in a section of the camp where gassed prisoners' possessions were sorted and shipped back to Germany.
“One day I even came across my mother's white dress and beige shawl among the piles of clothes,” she told the court.
Mr Groening has been dubbed “the bookkeeper of Auschwitz” because he worked in a section of the camp which collected prisoners' cash and belongings.
He claims to have been “only a small cog” in the Nazi extermination machine and says he only worked on the camp's selection ramp three or four times.
However, he has admitted complicity in mass murder and his own moral guilt.
Mrs Weiss said of him on Wednesday: “If I saw him now in his Nazi SS uniform, I would tremble and all the horror I experienced as a 13-year-old would return to me.
“To that 13-year-old, any person who wore that uniform in that place represented terror and the depths to which humanity can sink, regardless of what function they performed. And today, at the age of 84, I still feel the same way.”
The Independent