On the opening day of his trial on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, the man known as the "accountant of Auschwitz" told of the moment he lost his "euphoria for Adolf Hitler."
He was standing on a train platform after Hungarian Jews had been unloaded at the Nazi death camp. The unwitting condemned already had been sent to the gas chambers. The newly arrived slave laborers had been sent in a different direction.
Left behind on the platform was a crying infant. As the child cried, one of the now 93-year-old Oskar Groening's fellow SS officers approached it, grabbed it by the leg, dashed its head against a nearby truck, then tossed the lifeless body into the truck.
As horrific as that story is, what might have been more shocking was Groening's next observation.
"I don't know what else I could have expected the guard to do with the baby," he mused. "I suppose he could have shot it, though."
The casual acceptance of brutality that the former Waffen SS officer displayed even 70 years after the Third Reich was destroyed provided a rare insight into the twisted nature of the Nazi death camp mindset. Even from a man who admitted in court that he carried "moral guilt" if not legal guilt for the Holocaust, there was no notion that, perhaps, the baby did not need to have been killed.
He made the same point in his testimony Thursday. "I did not expect any Jews to survive Auschwitz," he said.
Efraim Zuroff, director and head Nazi hunter for the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Groening's testimony, even in its cool detachment, is unique and historically important.
"In my 35 years of trying to bring Nazis to justice, I've not met one Nazi who expressed any regret," he said. "Even now, his words show how deeply the attitudes that made the Holocaust possible run."
Zuroff noted that Groening hardly deserves credit for coming forward, at 93. He said he once had hoped that nearing the ends of their lives, more old Nazis "would want to come clean before they had to meet their maker."
That has not been the case with others. Zuroff noted that other Nazi war crimes defendants have tended to claim the wrong person was arrested or that they did not do what they were charged with doing. Groening, therefore, is different.
