Lueneburg, Germany (dpa) – A German court on Wednesday sentenced a 94-year-old former member of the Waffen-SS to four years in jail for his role as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The trial of Oskar Groening, often referred to as the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz, is expected to be one of the last cases brought against a former Nazi in Germany as most of the accused are now dead.

The regional court in the northern German town of Lueneburg convicted the former junior SS squad leader as an accessory to 300,000 murders of mostly Jews at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland more than 70 years ago.

State prosecutors must now decide whether Groening is able to serve a jail sentence considering his age and health. Health concerns for the nonogenarian prompted the court to reduce sittings to just three hours a day.

During the four-month trial, the court heard harrowing evidence from camp survivors and from Groening, who at one point recounted how an SS soldier had smashed a crying baby's head against a truck.

Some of the survivors were subjected to horrific medical experiments by the notorious Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele. More than 70 relatives of Auschwitz victims have been admitted as plaintiffs in the case.

A bank clerk in pre-war Germany, Groening never denied his Nazi past and accepted 'moral responsibility' for the Holocaust on the first day of his trial.

But in a written statement to the court, Groening said he could not ask Holocaust survivors for their forgiveness because he was not entitled to it considering the scale of their suffering.

"I can only ask God for forgiveness," wrote Groening.

At age 21, he volunteered to join the elite Waffen-SS before being recruited in 1942 to work at Auschwitz, where he counted the money found among the belongings of prisoners and sent it to SS headquarters in Berlin.

World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder welcomed the judgment, saying, "Albeit belatedly, justice has been done."

"Mr. Groening was only a small cog in the Nazi death machine, but without the actions of people like him, the mass murder of millions of Jews and others would not have been possible," he added.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which seeks to bring Nazis to justice, also welcomed the court's decision and called on the German government to allocate resources to legal cases against war criminals.

"It is abundantly clear that the window of opportunity to bring Holocaust perpetrators to justice will soon be closed, which makes the expedition of these cases of exceptional urgency," said the centre's chief Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff.

Located near the Polish city of Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest death camp established by the Nazis during World War II. More than 1 million people were murdered at the camp, the majority of them Jews. Only about 7,000 people survived.

In his evidence, Groening insisted that only twice or three times was he on Auschwitz's notorious ramp where new arrivals were either considered fit enough to engage in hard labour or sent to their death in the gas chambers.

The charges against Groening concerned the period between May and July 1944, when trains carrying Jews arrived in Auschwitz from Hungary. About 300,000 of them perished in the gas chambers.

For decades Groening led a normal life in Lueneburg, where he worked at a glass factory and lived with his wife and children after being released from a British prison shortly after the war.

dalje.com