http://mashable.com/2014/09/16/oskar-groening-groning-nazi-auschwitz-guard/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedly&utm_reader=feedly
Oskar Gröning is a former Nazi death camp guard who is currently facing trial in Germany.  Gröning (now 93) has been charged with 300 000 counts of accessary to murder.  The trial has highlighted what some see as the failure of German judiciary in bringing Holocaust perpetrators to justice. Out of the 6,500 SS members who worked at Auschwitz and survived the war, only 49 have ever been convicted.  The fact that Germany is cracking down now, when most who were involved at the time are in there nineties, seems like it is too little too late.

A major problem with putting these former Nazi officers on trial is questioning the degree of their guilt. For example, since his involvement in Auschwitz, Gröning has been one of the few former Nazi’s to speak out about what he did against Holocaust deniers. Some elected to become SS Guards based on their own free will and some only did it out of fear.  The main legal difficulty is in defining individual guilt.  It is very difficult to link specific murders to specific people involved, when they happened so long ago.

 “Accomplice would almost be too much for me. I would describe my role as a small cog in the gears. If you can describe that as guilt, then I am guilty, but not voluntarily. Legally speaking, I am innocent.”- Oskar Gröning.