In what could be the first case to test an innovative German government approach to prosecuting concentration camp guards for the deaths of Jewish prisoners during World War II, a 93-year-old man is scheduled to start trial on Tuesday in Lueneburg.

Oskar Groening is charged with being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jewish prisoners. He freely admits that he served as a non-commissioned SS officer at the notorious Auschwitz prison camp, but denies that he committed crimes, reports the Chicago Tribune.

By helping sort and tally the belongings hundreds of thousands of prisoners who were fatally gassed, including women and children, Groening “helped the Nazi regime benefit economically and supported the systematic killings,” an indictment says.

His lawyer, Hans Holtermann, has declined to comment in advance of the trial.

For decades after World War II ended in 1945, prosecutors in Germany proceeded on the assumption that proof of a specific crime against a specific person was required to hold camp guards accountable.

But that ended with the 2009 prosecution in Munich of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk. Accused of a role in killing 27,900 Jews in a German-occupied camp in Sobibor, Poland, he was convicted in 2011 on circumstantial evidence that he had worked at camps where war crimes occurred and sentenced to five years. A New York Times (reg. req.) article published in 2012 provides details.

Because appeals were not completed when Demjanjuk died in 2012, the prosecution theory that specific accountability was not required has not been fully tested in German courts.

Although not all concentration camp guards were directly involved in abusing or killing prisoners, they were all part of a genocidal system, said Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

“The system that the Nazis put in place in order to annihilate the Jewish people and the others they classified as enemies was made up of all sorts of people who fulfilled all sorts of tasks. Obviously Oskar Groening is not as guilty as Heinrich Himmler,” Zuroff said, referring to the head of the SS; however, “he contributed his talents to helping the system carry out mass murder.”

abajournal.com