Should minor administrative employees in death camps be punished?

As a German Nazi SS officer during the Second World War, Oskar Groening worked as an accountant at the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland.

He documented and evaluated the worth of all the valuables of the prisoners as they arrived off the trains.

But he didn’t kill anyone nor sign orders to kill, according to his testimony at a high-profile 2015 trial, in which he was convicted as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews.

he new documentary The Accountant of Auschwitz explores Groening’s case — looking at the complicity of him and other lower-level SS guards, and the debates surrounding their prosecution in the 1990s.

“The reason why he was on trial is because they could prove that he was on the ramp where the selections took place: this person goes to the gas chamber, this person goes to work,” said Matthew Shoychet, the doc’s Toronto-based director. It wasn`t Groening  who made that decision.  It was the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele that made the decisions.

The prosecutor said, “He (Groening) was right there when the genocide was taking place, so just him being there makes him complicit.”

at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival,  the film,  The Accountant of Auschwitz comes died at the time when he was to  start his four-year prison sentence, which he was appealing.

As Shoychet explains, Groening grew up in a nationalist family. After the war, he worked as a bookkeeper while living in his hometown in Germany. 

 
He wasn’t on the radar of prosecutors until 2005, when he did an interview with the BBC and candidly talked about his experiences at Auschwitz. Big Mistake on his part.

That led to his trial, in which Holocaust survivors including Bill Glied of Toronto testified. Glied sspoke in the film document , along with other survivors and a variety of academics, lawyers and journalists.

Also in the document was Benjamin Ferencz, a U.S. prosecutor at the post-war Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders.

Ricki Gurwitz, one of the doc’s producers, said she came up with the idea for the film after doing a segment on Groening’s trial while working as a TV news reporter.

She said, “One of the reasons we wanted to make this film is because the German judicial system, after the war, really did not prosecute Nazis.”

Their record is terrible. Out of the 6,500 SS guards at Auschwitz, only 49 were ever prosecuted In 2009 the interpretation of the law changed, so that meant that anyone who was just there could be prosecuted. That led prosecutors to Groening.

The filmmakers said Groening wouldn’t do an interview with them for the document, however, it does feature footage of him at his trial.

The film also looked at other Nazi war crimes trials, including that of John Demjanjuk who was a guard at that death camp.

Gurwitz said, “One of the questions, the central themes in our film, is Germany trying to make up for the mistakes of its past by prosecuting these lower-level SS guards who are 94, 95, today,”

“How complicit are they? They didn’t shoot anyone, they were just there. They helped the system run but they weren’t actually killing anyone. All their contemporaries have died, all their superiors who actually did the killing have died.

They’re the last men who are able to stand trial. Should they be facing prosecution because they’re the last men left standing? Or are they actually complicit because they were a minor cog in the machine and the machine would not have run without them there?”

In the film, one of the survivors says she initially had sympathy for Groening when she saw how frail he was in court. But that vanished when she saw a look of disdain on his face. Another survivor forgave him and hugged him in court, said Gurwitz.

It just goes to show that the accusations against these people who played a very minor part in the operating of the camp  is not so cut and dry, nor is it  not so black and white. There’s a lot of moral ambiguity when looking  at the real facts of such cases.

Now if the accountants, bookkeepers and those who sorted out the clothing taken from the Jews were members of the Nazi party, then that would be quite different. It is unlikely that these people were members of the Nazi Party. Further, if they use their positions to beat the prisoners, then they should be punished but so far that hasn`t been proven.

If a really bad guard in a prison in our current era beats a prisoner to death—should all the guards and office employees in that prison be arrested and sentence to prison? I hardly think so.

I realize why people in our current era are angry at those who committed war crimes in the last century. It is revenge that they seek. But aren’t we as a society going too far by going after minor employees of a death camp who had no intention of harming prisoners in their camps and were ordered to work in those camps as minor employees or else?