German court puts former Nazi officer on trial

A German court on Tuesday put on trial a former Nazi officer who is accused of being an accessory to mass killings carried out at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.

Oskar Groening, a former Nazi Waffen-SS member, admitted Tuesday on the opening day of the trial in the northern German city of Lueneburg that his work at Auschwitz during World War II made him "morally complicit." He asked for "forgiveness" over his role in the mass murder at the death camp.

According to prosecutors, Groening started to work at Auschwitz in occupied Poland at the age of 21. His nickname, the "bookkeeper", came from the fact that he was responsible for counting money and valuables gathered from inmates' luggage and passing them on to the SS authorities in Berlin.

The 93-year-old man is facing the charge of being an accessory to murder at Auschwitz. At least 300,000 Hungarian were killed in gas chambers at the camp between May and July 1944.

When Groening was charged in the German city of Hanover last year, prosecutors said he also helped remove victims' luggage to prevent it from being seen by new arrivals - thereby hiding traces of the Nazi mass killings.

Holocaust survivors and victims' relatives from different countries acting as co-plaintiffs came to Lueneburg on Tuesday to follow the proceedings of the case.

Groening is one of 30 former Auschwitz personnel who were recommended to state prosecutors in 2013 by the German office investigating Nazi war crimes. The renewed drive to bring justice over Holocaust crimes came following a 2011 landmark court ruling.

For more than 60 years, Nazi war criminals had only been prosecuted if evidence proved that they had personally committed atrocities. In 2011, however, a Munich court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years imprisonment for collaborating in the extermination of Jews at the Sobibor camp where he served as a guard.

Because of the fact that there are very few former soldiers still alive to face trials like Groening, his case is likely to be one of the last of its kind.