A former Auschwitz employee who has been charged in Germany with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder previously spoke out publicly against Holocaust denial, the Guardian newspaper reports.
Oskar Groening, 93, was charged in a Hanover court earlier this week. Once called “the accountant of Auschwitz,” he was responsible for counting the money taken from the luggage of murdered Jews from 1942 to 1944 and sending it back to SS headquarters in Berlin. He also stood guard as the transports entered the camp.
Groening has never denied being in Auschwitz. Appearing in the BBC documentary “Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution” in 2005, he said that pervasive Holocaust denial had led to him to speak out.
“I see it as my task now, at my age, to face up to these things that I experienced, and to oppose the Holocaust deniers who claim that Auschwitz never happened,” he said. “I saw the crematoria, I saw the burning pits.”
That we have now reached a point in history where many equate what the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust are doing to defend themselves with what happened in that horrible time doesn’t speak terribly well of us as a species.
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