Auschwitz book-keeper jailed for four years

Oskar Groening did not personally kill anyone but worked at the camp in Poland where he sorted bank notes from the belongings of incoming Jews.

Prosecutors argued that by doing this he supported the Nazi regime’s genocide.

Mr Groening previously admitted moral guilt but said it was for the court to determine whether he was legally guilty.

The trial focused on the question whether those who were indirectly involved in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust were guilty of any crimes.

The German justice system had previously answered this question in the negative.

While at Auschwitz, Mr Groening’s job was to remove bank notes from people’s luggage and send them to SS offices in Berlin to assist with the Nazi war effort.

The charges against him relate specifically to a period between May and July 1944 when 137 trains carrying about 425,000 Jews from Hungary arrived at the camp.

According to the indictment, at least 300,000 of them were sent to the gas chambers on arrival.

Prosecutors in Frankfurt did not pursue Mr Groening in the past as they said there was no causal link between individuals like him and the murder of Jews.

But Hanover prosecutors disagreed, encouraged by the case of Ivan Demjanjuk who was convicted of being an accessory to murder in 2011 even though there was no evidence he had committed a crime while a guard at the Sobibór extermination camp in Poland.