Oskar Gröning (10 June 1921 – 9 March 2018) was a German SS Unterscharführer who was stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. His responsibilities included counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners, and he was in charge of the personal property of arriving prisoners. On a few occasions he witnessed the procedures of mass killing in the camp. After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning surrendered to the British at the end of the war; his role in the SS was not discovered. He was eventually transferred to the UK as a prisoner of war and worked as a farm labourer.
Upon his return to Germany, he led a normal life, reluctant to talk about his time in Auschwitz. However, more than 40 years later, after learning about Holocaust denial, he decided to make public his activities at Auschwitz. He openly criticised those who denied the events that he had witnessed and the ideology to which he had subscribed. Gröning was notable as a German willing to make public statements about his experience as an SS soldier, which were self-incriminating and which exposed his life to public scrutiny. In particular, he confessed to stealing jewellery and money from gas chamber victims for his personal benefit.
In September 2014, Gröning was charged by German prosecutors as an accessory to murder in 300,000 cases, for his role at the Auschwitz concentration camp. His trial began in April 2015, after the court had ruled that, at the age of 93, he was still fit to stand trial. The trial was held in Lüneburg, Germany. On 15 July 2015, he was found guilty of knowingly facilitating mass murder and sentenced to four years' imprisonment. Following a number of unsuccessful appeals against the prison sentence, Gröning died on 9 March 2018 while hospitalized before he was set to begin his sentence.
Early life and education Gröning was born in June 1921, in Nienburg in what was then Prussia (today in Lower Saxony), the son of a skilled textile worker. His mother died when he was four. His father, a nationalist and strict conservative, joined Der Stahlhelm – a revanchist ultranationalist ex-serviceman's association – after Germany's defeat in the First World War (during which his father had lost an eye), and his father's anger at how Germany had been treated following the Treaty of Versailles increased as his textile business went bankrupt in 1929 due to insufficient capital.
Gröning stated that his childhood had been one of "discipline, obedience and authority". Gröning was fascinated by military uniforms, and one of his earliest memories was of looking at photos of his grandfather, who served in an elite regiment of the Duchy of Brunswick, on his horse and playing his trumpet. He told Der Spiegel in 2005, that as a child, he played marbles in the street with Anne Selig, the daughter of a Jewish ironmonger whose store was next to his home. When Nazi stormtroopers held up a sign outside the shop saying, "Germans, do not buy from Jews," he said, he was unmoved. As a boy in the 1930s, he first joined Scharnhorst (the youth wing of his father's organisation, Der Stahlhelm), and later the Hitler Youth when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Influenced by his family's values, he felt that Nazism was advantageous to Germany and believed that the Nazis "were the people who wanted the best for Germany and who did something about it." He participated in the burning of books written by Jews and other authors that the Nazis considered degenerate in the belief that he was helping Germany free itself from an alien culture, and considered that National Socialism was having a positive effect on the economy, pointing to lower unemployment.
Gröning left school with high marks and began a traineeship as a bank clerk when he was 17, but war was declared in 1939 shortly after he started employment, and eight of the twenty clerks present were immediately conscripted into the army. This allowed the remaining trainees to further their banking careers in a relatively short time; however, despite these opportunities, Gröning and his colleagues were inspired by Germany's quick victories in France and Poland and wanted to contribute.
SS career Gröning wanted to join an elite army unit and set his sights on joining the Schutzstaffel. Without his father's knowledge, he did so in 1940 at a hotel where the SS was recruiting. Gröning said that his father was disappointed to learn this when he came home after having joined.
Gröning described himself as a "desk person" and was content with his role in SS salary administration, which granted him both the administrative and military aspects he wanted from a career.
Auschwitz
Arrival
Gröning worked as a bookkeeper for a year until 1942, when the SS ordered that desk jobs were to be reserved for injured veterans, and that fit members in administrative roles were to be subjected to more challenging duties. Gröning and about 22 of his colleagues travelled to Berlin where they reported to one of the SS economic offices.
They were then given a lecture by several high-ranking officers who reminded them of the oath of loyalty they took, which they could prove by doing a difficult task. The task was top secret: Gröning and his fellow SS men had to sign a declaration that they would not disclose it to family or friends, or people not in their unit. Once this had concluded, they were split into smaller groups and taken to various Berlin stations where they boarded a train in the direction of Katowice with orders to report to the commandant of Auschwitz, a place Gröning had not heard of before.
Upon arrival at the main camp, they were given provisional bunks in the SS barracks, warmly greeted by fellow SS men and provided with food. Gröning was surprised at the myriad food items available in addition to basic SS rations. The new arrivals were curious about what function Auschwitz served. They were told that they should find out for themselves because Auschwitz was a special kind of concentration camp. Immediately someone opened the door and shouted "Transport!", causing three or four people to leave the room.
The next day, Gröning and the other arrivals reported to the central SS administrative building and were asked about their background before the war. One of the officers said Gröning's bank clerk skills would be useful, and took him to barracks where the prisoners' money was kept. Gröning was told that when prisoners were registered into the camp, their money was stored here and later returned to them when they left.
It became clear that Auschwitz was not a normal internment camp with above-average SS rations, but that it served an additional function. Gröning was informed that money taken from interned Jews was not actually returned to them. When he inquired further, his colleagues confirmed that the Jews were being systematically exterminated and that this had included the transport of prisoners who had arrived the previous night.
Tasks
Gröning's responsibilities included sorting and counting the multitude of currencies taken from arriving deportees, sending it to Berlin, and guarding the belongings of arrivals until they were sorted. He related that he was astonished to learn of the extermination process, but later accepted his part in it, stating that his work became "routine" after several months.
His bureaucratic job did not shield him completely from physical acts of the extermination process: as early as his first day, Gröning saw children hidden on the train and people unable to walk who had remained among the rubbish and debris after the selection process had been completed, being shot. Gröning also heard:
After witnessing this, Gröning claimed, he went to his boss and told him that he could not work at Auschwitz anymore, stating that if the extermination of the Jews is necessary, "then at least it should be done within a certain framework". Gröning claims that his superior officer denied this request citing a document he had signed before being posted, forcing him to continue his work.
One night towards the end of 1942, Gröning and others in their SS barracks on the outskirts of Birkenau were awakened by an alarm. They were told that a number of Jews who were being taken to the gas chambers had escaped and hidden in the woods. They were ordered to take pistols and search the woods. When his group arrived at the extermination area of the camp they saw a farmhouse, in front of which were SS men and the bodies of seven or eight prisoners who had been caught and shot. The SS men told Gröning and his comrades that they could go home, but they decided to remain in the shadows of the woods. They watched as an SS man put on a gas mask and emptied a tin of Zyklon B into a hatch in the cottage wall. Gröning said the humming noise from inside "turned to screaming" for a minute, then to silence. A comrade later showed him the bodies being burnt in a pit. A kapo there told him details of the burning, such as how gases developed in the body and made the burning corpses move.
Gröning claimed that this disrupted the relative tranquillity his job gave him and that he yet again complained to his superior. His boss listened but reminded him of the pledge that he and his fellow SS men made. Gröning thus returned to work. He declared that he manipulated his life at Auschwitz so as to avoid witnessing the camp's most unpalatable aspects.
After Auschwitz
Great Britain Gröning's application to transfer to a unit on the front-line was successful, and in 1944 he joined an SS unit fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. He was wounded and sent to a field hospital before rejoining his unit, which eventually surrendered to the British Army.
He realised that declaring "involvement in the concentration camp of Auschwitz would have a negative response", and so tried not to draw attention to it, putting on the form given to him by the British that he worked for the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt instead. He said he did this because "the victor's always right", and that things happened at Auschwitz which "did not always comply with human rights".
Gröning and the rest of his SS colleagues were imprisoned in an old Nazi concentration camp. He was later sent to the UK as a forced labourer in 1946 where he had a "very comfortable life". He ate good food and earned money, and travelled through the Midlands and Scotland giving concerts for four months, singing German hymns and traditional English folk songs to appreciative British audiences.
Gröning's name appeared in a file of the United Nations War Crimes Commission from 6 March 1947, listing 300 Germans stationed at Auschwitz suspected of war crimes by Marian Muszkat, the UNWCC representative of the Polish People's Republic. Gröning's entry accused him of "complicity in murder and ill-treatment". No further investigations were made after Sir Robert Craigie, representing the Foreign Office of Great Britain, asked the commission to stop taking new cases in April 1947 to instead focus on rebuilding Germany, a decision fiercely contested by Poland and Yugoslavia. As a result, any members of the SS within Allied custody who did not already have criminal proceedings against them were set for unconditional release.
Return to Germany Gröning was released and returned to Germany in 1947 or 1948. Upon being reunited with his wife, he said: "Girl, do both of us a favour: don't ask." He was unable to regain his job at the bank due to having been a member of the SS, so he got a job at a glass factory in his hometown of Nienburg, working his way up to a management position, becoming head of personnel. For twelve years, Gröning served as an honorary lay judge at the industrial tribunal of Nienburg's court.