Dec 17, 2014 23:00 mirror.co.uk
Former Auschwitz guard who constantly ''pleads for forgiveness'' to stand trial for Holocaust crimes
By Rachael Bletchly

Oskar Gröning is accused of deciding which of the 425,000 people arriving at the concentration camp by train would be killed.

Former SS guard Oskar Gröning shuddered as he described the horrors of the Nazis’ extermination of Jews in Auschwitz.

He claimed he had been haunted by victims’ screams and could never forget the sight of babies being murdered.

But while Gröning, 93, admitted he witnessed many atrocities during the Second World War, he insisted, of course, that he never committed any himself.

Prosecutors this week ruled Gröning is fit to stand trial for Holocaust crimes, so in spring a German court will finally decide if he is telling the truth.

He is one of 12 former camp personnel identified and charged in the past two years. But cases against the other 11 were dropped due to age, infirmity or lack of clear evidence.

However Gröning’s prosecution has brought new hope that Hitler’s last remaining henchmen will face justice.

Human rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi hunter Dr Efraim Zuroff, 66, said: “Every prosecution is an important reminder that justice can still be achieved for the victims. Old age should not afford a refuge for merciless killers.”

Gröning admits he collated money and possessions belonging to people murdered in the gas chambers and ­then shipped goods to Berlin.

But prosecutors have claimed that in 1944 he helped select which of the 425,000 people arriving by train, mostly from Hungary, would die in the gas chambers.

Gröning said: “Down the years I have heard the cries of the dead in my dreams. This guilt will never leave me. I can only plead for forgiveness and pray for atonement.”

But Nazi hunters are also praying – that they can get more suspects into the dock before their most-wanted list becomes even smaller.

Last month Dr Zuroff said his team was 99% sure the man at the top of that list for decades – SS Captain Alois Brunner – died in 2010 in Syria, aged 98.

The doctor was second in command to Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann and sent 129,000 Jews to the gas chambers.

He fled Germany for Syria in 1954 and in an interview in 1987 said “the Jews deserved to die”. Dr Zuroff called him “a monster”.

Meanwhile, the Wiesenthal Center is desperately trying to track down lower-ranking death squad members.

In September it sent the German authorities a list of 80 people who were in a Nazi group said to have killed a million people in Eastern Europe. All the suspects were born between 1920 and 1924, so some may still be alive.

“Time is running out,” said Dr Zuroff. “There is no reason to ignore these people just because they are elderly.

“They don’t deserve sympathy since they ­obviously had none for their victims.”

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