LUENEBURG, Germany — In one of the last chances to bring justice for the Holocaust, a German court convicted a 94-year-old former SS soldier of colluding in mass murder and delivered an unstinting depiction both of the horrors of Auschwitz and the depths of German guilt.
The former soldier, Oskar Groening, was sentenced Wednesday to four years in jail for complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews who were brought to the Nazis’ grimmest death camp in the summer of 1944.
In a sweeping 75-minute speech, Judge Franz Kompisch presented what amounted to a reckoning with decades of German justice and the failure to prosecute thousands of perpetrators. The judge made it plain that every German had a choice about how far to go along with the Nazis.
“This is a point that must be made clearly,” the judge said. To join the SS and take “a safe desk job” at Auschwitz “was your decision.” He added, “It was perhaps affected by the era, but it was not because you were unfree.”
Groening, a bank teller who during his 12-week trial offered chilling insight into the workings of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was employed there from September 1942 to October 1944, assigned to seize cash and valuables from arriving prisoners.
While he was not accused of gassing prisoners, Groening’s trial suggested that he had witnessed enough violence and cruelty to have a clear understanding of the systematic mass murder carried out at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
“You had freedom to think,” Kompisch said to Groening. Yet “you asked to join the SS.”
The main lawyer for the dozens of plaintiffs, Thomas Walther, called Kompisch’s judgment “historic,” saying that it was wonderful for his clients and could serve as a corrective to decades of lax prosecution of Nazis in German courts.
On Wednesday, the state prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt said that another former SS soldier who worked at Auschwitz, this one 92, is facing charges of being an accessory to murder.
In a biting passage, the judge noted that the state prosecutor’s office of Lueneburg, a midsize jurisdiction, handled some 30,000 cases a year. By comparison, he noted, specialists say 6,500 people worked for the SS at Auschwitz, yet only 49 of those have been convicted.
As the judge took the court on a journey to what he described as a seemingly distant past, the only sound in the makeshift courtroom — a meeting hall converted to accommodate interest in the trial — was the low background buzz of interpreters working in English, Hungarian, and Hebrew.
The sentence exceeded the 3½ years that state prosecutors had requested. Groening’s lawyers had sought an acquittal.
Both state prosecutors and Hans Holtermann, a lawyer for Groening, said they would consider whether to appeal in the next week. If so, it could be months before any sentence is final. Groening would not be jailed during that time.
The judgment came a day after Groening, increasingly frail though mentally alert, offered the court what he clearly intended as a direct apology for his crimes. “I am truly sorry,” he said. He refrained, however, from asking forgiveness from his victims.
Groening’s remarks as the trial opened on April 21 offered a remarkably clear if often harrowing account of his time in Auschwitz. He admitted his moral complicity but at that time stopped short of an apology. On July 1, he addressed the court once more, saying that the evil of the Holocaust was too great to entitle him to a pardon from anyone other than God.
None of the dozens of plaintiffs, who joined prosecutors in accusing Groening, were in court Wednesday. Their lawyers said the judge’s surprising decision on Tuesday to move immediately to a verdict meant that none had had the time to get back to Lueneburg.
But Leon Schwarzbaum, 94, was on hand. Although not a plaintiff, he had come from Berlin to see if justice would be done. Born in Hamburg in 1921, transported to Auschwitz from a Polish ghetto in 1943, Schwarzbaum said he lost 30 relatives in the Holocaust. He survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and at least one other camp.
Schwarzbaum said afterward that, although too long delayed, justice had been served.
For decades, the German legal system made it difficult to prosecute former SS members and camp guards if there was no direct evidence linking them to the mass killings of the Holocaust.
But the case of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who immigrated to the United States after World War II, changed that. A former autoworker, he was eventually extradited and sentenced in Munich in 2011 to five years in prison for his involvement in the killing of 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He died in 2012, before his appeal could be heard.