A former Nazi SS officer known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” has appealed a four-year jail sentence handed down to him last week, his legal team says.
Oskar Groening, 94, was convicted by a court in the northern German city of Lueneburg of accessory to murder in 300,000 cases of Hungarian Jews sent to the gas chambers from May to July 1944.
One of his attorneys, Hans Holtermann, said he had taken his case to the Federal Court of Justice, a higher tribunal.
Groening’s lawyers had argued during the three-month trial his role at the extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland had been “minor” and demanded an acquittal.
Prosecutors sought three-and-a-half-years’ jail for Groening based on the “nearly incomprehensible number of victims”, but mitigated by “the limited contribution of the accused” to their deaths.
Groening served as an accountant at Auschwitz, sorting and counting the money taken from those killed or used as slave labor, and shipping it back to his Nazi superiors in Berlin. Read more at ABC.
{Matzav.com}
