'Auschwitz book-keeper' sentenced to four years for role in Nazi death camps

A former Auschwitz prison guard has been found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of thousands of Jews at the Nazi death camp and has been sentenced to four years in prison.

Oskar Groening, 94, became known as the 'Auschwitz book-keeper' due to his role sorting through bank notes taken from Jews arriving at the death camp and sending them to SS offices in Berlin, where they were used to help fund the war effort.

While Groening did not actively take part in the murders of Jews, prosecutors argued that he helped the camps to run smoothly.

The trial, held in the northern German city of Lüneberg, is widely regarded to be one of the last major Holocaust trials. There is speculation as to whether Groening will actually serve his sentence in prison in full, due to his age.

During the course of the trial Groening admitted his 'moral guilt' but has always maintained it was up to the court to determine his legal guilt.

Groening was 21 when he was first sent to work at the death camp in 1942, but the charges relate to the period between May and July 1944 when around 425,000 Jews from Hungary arrived in Auschwitz. At least 300,000 of them were sent straight to the gas chambers.

During the trial, which began in April, Groening described the horrific scenes he had witnessed inside the camp, including the gassing of Jews forced into a farm building near the camp and the murder of a crying baby at the hands of an SS guard who slammed the baby's head against a truck until it was quiet.

"I was so shaken," Groening told the court. "I don't find what he did good at all." He said that he later requested a transfer from Auschwitz.

At the end of the trial, Groening spoke briefly to apologise and to say that he agreed with the comments of the prosecuting lawyer, Cornelius Nestler, who said that Auschwitz "was a place where you could not simply take part". "I sincerely regret that I did not recognize that earlier," he told the court. "I am truly sorry."

The trial heard from a number of Holocaust survivors. During the trial, Eva Kor, a co-plaintiff and Holocaust survivor publicly forgave Groening, choosing to embrace him in court and later said on television that Groening should not be sentenced to prison.

Kor and her twin sister Miriam endured medical experiments at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele, the so-called 'Angel of Death'.

However, her dramatic intervention was criticised by some. Nestler, in an interview with Deutsche Welle this week, said his clients had been left disgusted by Kor's actions, which he said should have been kept private.

"If you are a co-plaintiff, which means you support the indictment, you should not use that situation to forgive the defendant," he said. "You either want him to be indicted, or you want to forgive him. It's either/or. And all our clients think the same way. They found it disgusting, really disgusting, what she did."

The president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, said that "justice has been done" as a result of the prison sentence handed down.

"Mr Groening was only a small cog in the Nazi death machine," he said "but without the actions of people like him, the mass murder of millions of Jews and others would not have been possible."