The Accountant of Auschwitz (2018)

[JLAD Prove Me Wrong]

So there is a film titled "The Accountant Of Auschwitz". The premise of the film is about the trial of Oskar Gröning, and whether he is guilty of the deaths of some 300,000 at Auschwitz. Even though the film admits he didn't directly kill people, he is treated as an accessory to murder, for not stopping the killings which were claimed.

The film also talks about how a lot of National Socialists escaped the show trials of their vicars, the Allies.

What was interesting is that towards the end of the film, Gröning claimed that the Holocaust did occur, because he saw burning pits and crematoria. Which of course raises the question, why would he convict himslef in this way, by admitting to these atrocities, which indeed, never occurred?


https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8148018/?ref_=nm_knf_i1

[Lamprecht]

why would he convict himslef in this way, by admitting to these atrocities, which indeed, never occurred?

But there were cremations, that is a fact. As for why he would say the "Holocaust" occurred, because saying it didn't isn't going to do him any good. The most common defense was "Yeah it happened but I didn't have anything to do with it"

People see courts as authoritative sources of truth, they trust the judgments. But these were no normal trials. The victims were the judge and jury. There was no risk for the witnesses to be charged with perjury. Besides, he isn't convicting himself by saying people were burned.

[Sannhet]

I recently watched this documentary, The Accountant of Auschwitz. There is some good material of interest here.

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Background: The Oskar Groening trial lasted from Sept. 2014 to Nov. 2016; he was convicted of the charge of "accessory to 300,000 murders 70 years earlier," but died in 2018, hounded in his final years by legal harassment and the threat of an imminent prison sentence, where he would die.

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The crew

• Director: Matthew Shoychet

• Writer: Ricki Gurwitz

• Producers: Ricki Gurwitz and Ric Esther Bienstock

Billed as "a Canadian documentary," the director, writer and producer are all Jews. I don't know about funding.

Here they are at a Nov. 2018 film festival Q&A (Bienstock at left, then Gurwitz, then Shoychet; a discussion moderator at right):

The viewer gets the impression that some of the footage was from "real time," that is, as events are ongoing. I don't know when filming occurred, and they may have borrowed film from various sources, but at least some appears to be in 2015/16 (there are referenced to the refugee crisis of that time as something ongoing). Some of the interviews are definitely from 2017.

This documentary was shown in film festivals throughout 2018 and became widely available to the public starting in mid- and late-2019, so I assume millions may have seen it by now in one form or another. It has 2,067 reviews on IMDB, suggesting

The following is a mix of review, reaction, commentary, and synopsis. Lots of contents here of interest to Revisionists.

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"The enemy is the blood inside them"

The Accountant of Auschwitz starts with scenes of almost nostalgia for Auschwitz, smiling people, upbeat music, talk of it being like a small town with sports and socializing opportunities. A voice-over narrative from an unidentified man, speaking German, says (via English voice-over):

"We were convinced, by our worldview, that we had been betrayed by the entire world, and that there was a great conspiracy of the Jews against us."

A second voice comes on:

"But surely when it comes to children, You must have realized that they couldn't possibly have done anything?!"

At this point, we are shown a black-and-white photograph, the face of a spectacled young man in SS uniform. The music turns dark and fades into that of an old man speaking in a video interview. He says:

"The children, they're not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood inside them."

Then it cuts to the title: "THE ACCOUNTANT OF AUSCHWITZ."

No context is given for these comments. Quite a lot of viewers might end up thinking this man, the speaker, whoever he is, believes those words, is stating his own personal views at the time of the interview. (So here we have the documentary off to something of a dishonest start.)

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Meeting the Survivors and Co-Plaintiffs

A BBC-like news clip informs us that "a former guard" at Auschwitz was to go on trial, charged with "300,000 counts of accessory to murder."

Cut to a different old man slowly walking around Auschwitz, to sad and ominous music. This man says his family had a secret, a burden, with the children all asking, "Why don't we have any aunts, uncles, grandparents?" Next the camera takes us to an old woman. Looking at the camera, she says: Try to imagine if, suddenly, people show up and grab your family; try to imagine you have to leave your home, and you don't know if you'll see home or family again, and you're suddenly alone.

We return to the man we just met. He is identified as "Bill Glied, Auschwitz Survivor." He explains he had been approached by Thomas Walther, the German Federal Republic regime prosecutor in the trial of Oskar Groening. The woman is identified as "Hedy Bohm, Auwschitz Survivor." She, too, was approached to help convict Groening, by then a man in his nineties, in the latest political show trial.

She says she hated having to remember being a "sixteen-year-old slave" and didn't relish going to Germany, but she did. She says prosecutor Thomas Walther convinced her to come by saying: "It's not only about you and Groening and the past. It's about establishing a precedent for the future." Trial witness Bill Glied says the same, and adds that it's important to prosecute Nazis because (he claims to believe) so many got off without punishment. "This trial is a defining moment in the history of the Holocaust." (A strange comment to make, really, given that the trial occurred 75 years later; how can anything 75 years later be defining of that thing? Something in the late 1930s as the defining moment of the US Civil War? Strange comment.)

Next we see Thomas Walther himself, the prosecutor who brought this trial into being. He looks to be a typical former "68'er" now in his seventies. He says if you participate in killings at age twenty, you can be tried at age fifty, or age ninety. (This is a nonchalant attitude from a country that theoretically respects the legal principle of a "statute of limitations" on crimes.)

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Local Reaction: shock, media circus, some grumblings of opposition

The documentarians are now on the ground in Germany. First we briefly meet Kai Feldhaus, identified as a journalist with BILD. He says the town where the trial took place was shocked by it. A real Nazi had been living among them!

The local community center was converted into a mega-sized courtroom to accommodate "all these people, all the media attention," and open seating for the public. (After all, this kind of trial is vital to the legitimacy of the Federal Republic as a regime.)

Ominous music plays as they do some "vox populi" interviews with some locals they find out and about. The first man they show agrees that Groening must be punished for what "they" did to the Jews. Next a man inside a bar is against the trial, saying: "The little ones hang and the big ones are let off. It doesn't make sense to convict a 93-year-old man." An old man out for a walk is more forceful still in opposing the trial: "He [Groening] was, more or less, forced. He was a follower." He adds that millions were followers, no one knew anything. A woman, apparently his wife, shares the sentiment. They allowed themselves to show some limited outrage at the travesty of these endless political trials. These "local residents," as they are identified, are all speaking German.

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An Anti-Fascist Hero

Next we have a man identified as an "Anti-Fascist Activist," whose key role in the whole affair is slowly revealed. Name: Hans-Juergen Brennecke. (I find online that he was born 1944/45.)

Brennecke says he never learned "a single thing" about World War II in school and had to piece it together from movies and books as a teenager in the early 1960s. He claims all anyone said in Germany in those days was about how hard the war was and how they were heroes. "No one talked about the victims." The music turns very dark. Brennecke says: "We had so many criminals in our country. Millions of them! And nobody explained to us what really happened." Brennecke says both his parents "supported the Nazis." He says his father committed suicide in 1953 and insinuates that his father a Nazi loyalist to the end, opposed the new Federal Republic regime. He said his mother just listened to what his father said and believed and went along. It sounds like he still harbors some negative feelings towards his own parents which probably explain his general worldview.

(Yes, I think Brennecke is a typical, somewhat sad example of the Westerner, especially German, of his generation. He is a 68'er, by age, and very much by disposition, an extreme example of the archetype given that he identifies even in his seventies as an "Anti-Fascist." His appearance and demeanor are also of an ex-Sixties/Seventies semi-counter-culture type. Something about him reminds me of the Weathermen decades later, as they appeared in a 2000s documentary I once saw. Brennecke looks to have stayed loyal to it all, the rebellion of youth, through middle age and into late life. In 2018-19, Brennecke made the news not for fighting fascism but for fighting for the right to assisted suicide, after he was diagnosed with a bad form of cancer. So he morphed from Anti-Fascist Activist, to Crusader for Assisted Suicide. Ironic?)

We slowly learn that Brennecke the Anti-Fascist Activist was an integral part of the legal proceedings against Oskar Groening. He was active with a local "anti-fascist organization" with which the lead prosecutor, Thomas Walther, got in contact. They coordinated, as Groening explains, to organize a local defense and public-relations campaign against Holocaust Deniers and to keep right-wing fanatics "away from survivors and their relatives." On screen we are shown footage of some rallies of what appears to be German Nationalists in the 2010s. One banner says: "Refugees Not Welcome."

Next see a small meeting of the Anti-Fascist activists, apparently in a planning session on how to block the Holocaust Deniers. One woman speaking is interviewed, seemingly at a much later date (as she has visibly put on weight). This is "Astrid Steinert, Anti-Fascist Activist" (born circa 1980?). She says: "We have a lot of racism here in Germany. Lots of houses are burning." On screen is flashed a December 2015 article titled "200 refugee homes burned or attacked." She says people have to act now to stop the new fascists.

Next comes on some clips from newscasts of the time (Wolf Blitzer, Scott Pelley, Mark Phillips). "The man being charged admits he was at Auschwitz but claims he didn't kill anybody. He just took the victims' money. This court will now decide whether the so-called 'Accountant of Auschwitz' is also guilty as an accessory to mass murder."

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The Menacing Holocaust Deniers

Our Anti-Fascist Activist semi-hero of the documentary so far, Hans-Juergen Brennecke, tells us "the first day, eleven Holocausts Deniers came" to the trial. We are shown group of people noisily protesting. Two of those prominently shown are named as Thomas Wulff (in a distinctive cap) and Ursula Haverbeck.

Someone is shown interviewing Haverbeck, possibly the documentarians but this is not made clear. The documentary identifies her as "Ursula Haverbeck, Holocaust Denier"). She calmly says, to her interlocutor, that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp and no one was gassed. She gets off that sentence but hardly anything more, for suddenly we see a policeman spring into action. He demands the interview cease and rebukes her. (Haverbeck has here, of course, just openly broken German law by saying there were no gassings. She sits is in prison today for her continually doing so.)

Here is a series of images I grabbed from the attempted interview with Ursula Haverbeck, abruptly cut short by this burly policeman who appears out of nowhere:

Some other commotion of protestors is shown. "Thomas Wulff, Holocaust Denier" is then show demanding access to the trial but blocked police. Meanwhile the anti-fascist protestors are out with a banner that says "Justice for the Victims of Auschwitz," and two among them carry a large Israeli flag.

Footage of the trial is next, interspersed with commentary from the star witnesses we've met, Bill Glied and Hedy Bohm ("Auschwitz Survivor, Co-Plaintiff"). Now we also meet another Auschwitz survivor, Max Eisen. He tells the camera, "No one should be able to get away with crimes against humanity, against Jews." Another is Eva Mozes Kor. She explains she was good friends with Rainer Hoess, who she says "is a big advocate against the Neo-Nazis." Cut immediately to a man with a greying beard looking very relaxed, identified on screen as Rainer Hoess. "I am the grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp." Rainer says his grandfather "was responsible for 1.1 to 1.3 million killings." Rainer says the trial against Oskar Groening is important because it gives the chance to "listen to the perpetrators."

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Meeting Oskar Groening, as a "pitiful old man"

We finally meet Oskar Groening. His introduction on screen is a little strange. Unsurprisingly the music is dark and ominous. A few dozen media people and camera teams all focus their attention on a red car. A white-haired man is in it and slowly gets out. He is not senile but he is clearly in the twilight of his mental abilities. Someone asks him what he expected the outcome to be. He mumbles, "Freispruch, ich weiss es nicht" ("a verdict of not guilty, I don't know") and awkwardly laughs. Next we see just how frail this man is: He is escorted into the makeshift court room in a walker, somewhat hunched over ,assisted by a man in a suit. A man in a bulletproof vest looks on.

Auschwitz Survivor Hedy Bohm comes back to say "he looked like a pitiful old man" and she initially felt sympathy, but her feelings turned negative when he sat down and crossed his arms and had a facial expression she for some reason didn't like. "I thought, You are the same Nazi, the same person who thought you were gods and we were vermin. Still. So all my sympathy vanished."

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Groening agrees to tell all

Now we return to the BILD reporter, Kai Feldhaus, who says the significance of the Groening trial was because Groening was "one of the few, if not the first, who said that he will basically 'say something' in court." Anti-Fascist Activist Brennecke chimes in, praising Groening at the trial: "He told the truth," unlike some unnamed others at Auschwitz who lied when on trial.

Groening collected the luggage of arriving passengers for valuables, and we see images on screen of piles of shoes and gold rings and the like. BILD reporter Feldhaus then says the collection of valuables proves the Holocaust, and that the act of plundering valuables from arriving Jews meant "everyone working there knew people were brought there to die."

At this point in the documentary, quotations from Groening about Auscwhitz flash on screen, just short one-liners of text. One is: "They belonged to the State. The Jews had given them up to us. ...They no longer needed them."

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"The Nazis were treated incredibly, shockingly lightly" theme

Now for some reason we are shown Alan Dershowitz ("Professor of Law, emeritus, Harvard University"). Dershowitz (who always has some kind of one-liner to deliver for any occasion, and is often on US conservative media) says Groening was punished as a sacrificial lamb, and that if "the real perpetrators had been effectively punished," he would've never been put on trial, as too far down on the list. "The real issue is what did Germany do, not only during the war but [also] after the war." He then calls Germany's post-war behavior "Disgraceful!" This bizarre comment is not elaborated on -- yet (it will be later). The documentary cuts to Palm Beach, Florida.

Sympathetic music accompanies us as we meet the man who looks almost stereotypically Jewish and who explains he was a war crimes investigator. This is Benjamin B. Ferencz, "Chief Prosecutor, Einsatzgruppen Trial, Nuremburg, 1947-1948."

We stay with Ferencz for quite a while, which itself is a strange turn in the documentary because the trial he presided over had nothing to do with Auschwitz, the nominal subject. Ferencz talks a while about how bad these Einsatzgruppen were. "All of them pleaded Not Guilty. No one came in and said 'I did anything.' My goodness, no." They were just following orders, they claimed, but were all definitely guilty.

Ferencz, in very old age (b.1920, still living as of this writing), is shameless and unrepentant about the political show trials he was involved in. He has no doubt any of the defendants were guilty, no sympathy that any overreaction occurred. Quite the opposite, it seems his regret is only they couldn't snag more. There were only 22 seats in the docket, but he claims he could have charged and convicted three thousand for mass murder. We see archival footage of Ferencz as a young man at Nuremburg.

The documentary stays with Ferencz for a very long time (more than four full minutes, consecutive, just on him). This is strange considering the Einsatzgruppen cases are completely tangential to the Groening "Accountant of Auschwitz" case.

We then meet Eli Rosenbaum ("Former Director, DOJ Office of Special Investigations" -- this is a very casual way of saying this for an allegedly Canadian crew; DOJ is U.S. Department of Justice). Rosenbaum praises Nuremburg as "the beginning of international criminal law as we know it." But he says ordinary Germans disliked the trials as "Victor's Justice." Rosenbaum insinuates that lots of Nazis got off very easy, after pressure from the new West German government urging release of convicted Nazis. Ominous music.

Next is Rebecca Wittman ("Chair, Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto"), who says people don't want to focus on their crimes and want to move on.

Dershowitz then comes back on screen and in a highly agitated tone he claims the Germans "deliberately decided not to prosecute Nazi war criminals, because many of the judges were Nazi war criminals!" He then claims most West German judges before 1968 were "Nazis. I don't say 'former Nazis,' I say 'Nazis.' People who sympathize with the Nazis." "Obviously, the result was terrible, terrible injustice." Dershowitz later claims he has "nightmares" about "that famous photograph of the German solider shooting the mother and her baby, and imagining this man lived a full and complete life, and died with his own grandchildren surrounding him, thinking he was a wonderful man. That's the legacy of the Holocaust in Germany. Not the few war-crime trials."

Professor Wittman from Toronto is back to echo the point, claiming "99%" of the West German Ministry of Justice were "former Nazis."

Trials with supposedly ultra-light sentences are \shown on screen:
- Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1958;
- Treblinka Trial, 1964;
- Sobibor Trial, 1965;
- Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1965;
- The case of Hans Stark, who "poured Zyklon B into gas chambers," was "released after 3 years in prison."
- Klaus Dylewski, "participated in shootings, gassing and torture," was "released after 3 years in prison."
- Victor Capesius, "in charge of chemicals used in extermination," was also "released after 3 years in prison."

Back to Professor Rebecca Wittman. She says the West German record is "terrible, terrible record where almost nobody is convicted." She says the Nazi trials were a travesty because "they nail a few bad apples to the wall, and the rest of them look like innocent people who didn't deserve to be punished anyway, because they're not really dangerous outside of the camp setting. This is where, for me, these trials are such a disaster."

Wittman says over 100,000 former SS men were investigated from 1947 to the present.; 6,200 were brought to trial; 124 were convicted for murder. She is outraged by how low this is.

(Wittman, b.1970, of California origin, and seemingly of White-Christian origin and bearing a German surname, seems to say the only path to justice is a mass purge, tens of thousands of death sentences or decades in prison? A "salting the earth" strategy? A dash of the Kauffmann Plan, perhaps?)

Eli Rosenbaum is then shown saying a lot of times people are too cowardly to admit their past crimes and "struggle to come to grips with," citing US slavery, but that "it was certainly true in Germany with respect to Nazi genocide. ...Imagine a population in which a significant percentage of fathers, brothers, sons, took part in these crimes. Later on, grandfathers. All over Germany. It was very difficult for the German public to accept the idea of large-scale prosecutions."

On this question of the supposedly incredibly light treatment Nazis got in the past, Edith Raim ("Author, Nazi War Crimes Against Jews and German Post-War Justice") is brought on camera and said the later trials were designed to make up for the mistakes of the past.

Ten minutes of documentary time (13% of run-time) is dedicated solely to this set-up of claiming how unfair it was that so few were punished for the Holocaust (and the long appearance by Benjamin Ferencz seems solely to serve to pad around the line that he could have convicted three thousand but they only got twenty-two).

This is all a roundabout defense or the bizarre and time-honored Federal Republic tradition of trotting out elderly Nazis for political trials.

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"Are political trials of octogenarians and nonagenarians a good idea?" theme

Meeting the obvious criticism head on, Peter Singer ("Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University") says it is problematic to punish a man of 93 for what he did at 23. "Are you still punishing the person who did the crime?"

Rebecca Wittman agrees that it looks "ridiculous" to do these trials of men in their nineties.

Besides the vox populi segments with one or two "yokel locals" who expressed the sentiment that trials of this kind against elderly and frail men are outrageous, and this carefully worded ethical criticism by Jewish ethicist Peter Singer, no more of this is to be had.

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[To be continued....]

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[Sannhet]

[Continued]

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"Why now?"

The documentary -- which is supposed to be about Oskar Groening but actually mainly isn't -- continues as we meet Efraim Zuroff ("Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem"). Zuroff wears a yamaka. In a gruff, New York accent, Zuroff says: "All this is happening because it's doable now. Forty years ago, fifty years ago [i.e., 1960s/70s], it was far from doable."

Also brought on to rebke the West German government is Lawrence Douglas ("Professor of Law, Amherst College;" b.1960?; he is also Jewish). The West Germans used "the wrong legal frame to try to digest the crimes of the Holocaust." This is because, back in the words of Zuroff, they relied on the (implied to be crazy-on-its-face) legal principle that prosecutors had to prove (1) a specific crime, (2) against a specific victim, and (3) that it had done so motivated by racial hatred (for the case of these war-crimes trials). Douglas: The old legal principle, No convictions without direct guilt (What an outrageous idea!), was a problem.

While Douglas is still talking, the documentarians have the viewers looking at old black-and-white photo of an apparent execution of a young man on screen. (This is a famous "Holocaust photo" sometimes called "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa.") The camera pans around the photograph, circling in red the heads of many guards in the background.

Lawrence Douglas: "Many, many, many of the guards who we might wish have been convicted, couldn't have been [...] The Germans failed to create an adequate legal idiom, theory, that would permit these guards to be convicted." (The documentarians are still circling heads in red on the old photograph as he is saying this, implying that they are 'guards.' As they are in uniform in the field, they are clearly not guards, and the execution is plausibly of a partisan.)

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The ramping-up of politicized Holocaust trials of the elderly: Demjanjuk

Both Zuroff and Douglas say everything changed in the mid-1980s with the first trial of John Demjanjuk. This begins a long segment on the tangent of Demjanjuk.

(The legal pressure on Demjanjuk was ongoing throughout the 1980s. He was in public attention already by 1977, with Jews accusing him of being involved in exterminations. This aligns closely to the birth of the hardened Holocaust Narrative itself in the late 1970s. So "everything changed" is right, as it is right when the Holocaust narrative broke through into the cultural-hegemonic force in the West which it is recognizable as in our time. True Believer Professor Rebecca Wittman [b.1970], brought on earlier to slam Germany for going light on Nazis, was just coming into adult consciousness when this was going on.)

Eli Rosenbaum (Former Director, US Dept. of Justice Office of Special Investigations) slams Demjanjuk as a fake refugee who had admitted he lived at "Sobibor, Poland" but dumb gentiles in the U.S. government didn't know how sacred the site of Sobibor was, so the Monster slipped through. (Rosenbaum doesn't use the phrase "dumb gentiles, but I infer that it's what he is thinking based on wording and tone.)

Rosenbaum:

Sobibor is a word that should send a chill up the spine of every person on this planet. One normally six there were six Nazi death camps, extermination camps, that is, places that existed solely to murder people.

On screen we say a map with six red swastikas within a a black map of eastern Europe with national borders in white. Labels appears above them, one by one, as Rosenbaum speaks:

"Majdanek: 80,000 murdered;" "Sobibor: 167,000 murdered;" Chelmno: 172,000 murdered;" "Belzec: 434,500 murdered" (he pronounces this Bell-cess"); "Treblinka: 925,000 murdered;" and "Auschwitz-Birkenau: 1,100,000 murdered."

Douglas also slams Demjanjuk for living a lie under, cover over employment at Ford for twenty-five years, until his secret was exposed.

The trial-by-media and legal harassment of John Demjanjuk begins in 1977, and would continue off and on for the rest of his life. We se ea newspaper headlined "War Atrocities Linked to Cleveland Area Man" (Aug. 26, 1977).

Next we follow some 1980s video clips of Demjanjuk. He is hauled off to Israel for trial.

(The Holocaust Industry was as the cusp of becoming dominant in the West during his first trial, but Demjanjuk in some ways does not fill his prescribed role within the Narrative. We see footage of Demjanjuk in handcuffs, defiant, smiling, seeming to mock the proceedings. I suppose the image the Narrative and its zealots would have had people believe was of Demjanjuk doing straight-arm salutes in court and going on uncontrolled rants against Jews. If there were anything like this, this documentary team would've found and used it, but no.)

We see scenes of people on the witness stand, denouncing Demjanjuk. One is Eliahu Rosenberg (identified as a "Treblinka Death Camp Survivor"), who is shown emotionally ranting and gesticulating, denouncing Demjanjuk from the witness stand. One tense clip from the trial shows Rosenberg breaking loose, walking menacingly towards Demjanjuk in court; Demjanjuk is seated, wearing an earpiece for live translation. Rosenberg gets close. Demjanjuk rises, extends a hand. Rosenberg refuses it, insults him, and looks like he wants to hit Demjanjuk in the face. The court asks Rosenberg to sit down and a guard appraoches. Rosenberg is then seen crying on the witness stand. The music is ominous and sad.

A newspaper on screen, dated Feb. 26, 1987, screams "This Man is a Killer; Witness identifies 'Ivan the Terrible'." Demjanjuk is shown at trial saying over and over that he is innocent. At one point he is hauled off in a secure police vehicle and he says to a camera: "I'm not Ivan the Terrible! I'm a good man!" He was convicted, of course. Much excitement followed among the crowd of Jews packing the public area of the court, who of course had demanded blood and were celebrating.

(Note that this goes on for several valuable minutes of a documentary which theoretically has as its subject the person of Oskar Groening, Accountant of Auschwitz.)

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Demjanjuk Innocent, but precedent established

The opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s proved Demjanjuk innocen. "Ivan the Terrible" had been a different man, an "Ivan Marchenko," we are told.

Lawrence Douglas then makes the surprising concession:

"Structuring these trials around eyewitness testimony of survivors" had "limits." "These survivors were positive that Demjanjuk was their former tormentor, and they were wrong."

In 1993, Demjanjuk was set free after years of false imprisonment. Lawrence Douglas, though, says Demjanjuk was "not entirely free of guilt."

Eli Rosenbaum comes back on to compare Demjanjuk's role in the Holocaust to building cars, with which Demjanjuk was involved for most of this working life in the USA. Demjanjuk only did one specific thing in the process of building cars, and "he never built an entire car himself." "At places like Auschwitz, Sobibor, what the SS personnel there 'did for a living' was kill...innocent...human...beings" (Rosenbaum says these last four words very slowly). "There was nothing else going on there."

We are shown WWII-era photographs and film of people marching under armed guard, then an unidentified pile of bones.

Next we cut to a video dated Feb. 21, 2002: Michael Chertoff ("U.S. Assistant Attorney General"), also Jewish like almost every other commentator in this documentary, announces at a press conference that the U.S. had stripped John Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship for "serving the Nazis during World War II" at "the Sobibor death camp." Involved in this process was none other than Eli Rosenbaum, shown also in the 2002 news conference announcing (in effect) that the US was going to legally harass Demjanjuk until he breaks.

Rosenbaum ca. 2017 is shown again, now with greying hair, revealing that they had been at work against Demjanjuk throughout the entirety of the 2000s. They had also worked with Germany to accept him, but Germany had refused, "as Germany and other governments of Europe have routinely done in our cases. Enormously frustrating." Rosenbaum then says he met Thomas Walther and another German prosecutor, Kristen Goetze to strategize on how to get Demjanjuk indicted in Germany. Photographs from the time show them together. Rosenbaum tips his hand that the persecutions of John Demjanjuk in the last ten or so years of his life were really entirely the initiative of the U.S. federal government apparatus, and not the Germans.

(The wheels were in motion for another in the stream of political shows of Nazis, trial beneficial to both regimes, the senior-partner the United States and also the junior partner, the Federal Republic of Germany.)

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Sympathy for Demjanjuk?

Kristen Goetze ("German prosecutor") is brought on, now in the ca. 2017 interview, insisting that Demjanjuk was "part of the whole killing process." Rosenbaum triumphantly announces how Demjanjuk was finally deported to Germany (April 2009).

But, then, a turn:

A home video of Demjanjuk from April 2009 is shown. This is shortly before his deportation. He is wheelchair bound, has lost all his hair, and is shown sobbing, surrounded by family members, also sobbing. It appears he cannot even move under his own power. What appear to be federal agents haul him off in his wheelchair, carrying him down steps in the wheelchair. (He was nearly eighty and would be dead in three years.)

A strange choice to show the visual on the screen of family members of various generations sobbing goodbyes, to the pathetic spectacle of a frail old man hauled off by "G-men." A voice-over of Efraim Zuroff ("Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem") gloats about what a success this all was.

The music accompanying the pull-away of the deportation van is sad, not sinister. The sadness shown by the family is palpable. Are the documentarians sympathetic to Demjanjuk? This would be quite a turn.

But no! The music turns sinister again: The screen flashes the words "U.S. Department of Justice Surveillance Video / One Week Earlier." Demjanjuk is shown apparently walking, albeit very slowly, with the aid of his wife, out of his car (he was in the passenger's seat, suggesting he really was too frail to drive). The FBI agent, part of the team to monitor Demjanjuk, in the car says "He's walking." ('Gotcha!')

An unspecified voice-over says that (re-)accused Nazi criminal Demjanjuk was lying about being too frail to go on trial and that the video shows otherwise. Demjanjuk arrives in Germany on May 9, 2009. Next Lawrence Douglas ("Professor of Law, Amherst College;" Jewish) is back to pile on, saying Demnjanjuk pretended to be too ill or frail or not mentally competent, calling it a "theatrical performance." Efraim Zuroff and Eli Rosenbaum both come on, three Jews as in unison accusing Demjanjuk of faking frailty. Rosenbaum adds that "for decades" accused Nazis have used this tactic. He seems to call all such cases "ruses," which some courts "have fallen for."

Lawrence Douglas, sounding frankly sinister himself, says proof that Demjanjuk was in fine health is the fact that "he survived his trial"! (What a standard!)

One of the only real words of defense in the travesty political show trial of Demjanjuk is from Ulrich Busch ("Demjanjuk's Lawyer"), who says on camera, "John Demjanjuk is just a scapegoat for the Germans."

But the US-based or US-tied Jewish legal experts, one after another, explain why it was proper to try Demjanjuk. Per Douglas: "Your job description was basically facilitating an act of extermination." (This is very close now to simply a legalization of a theory of blood-guilt, collective-guilt, mass-guilt; strictly applied, all US Air Force officers could be put on trial for Hiroshima or the firebombing of Tokyo, or at least those somewhere among the part of the Air Forces involved in the bombings; all RAF officers could be put on trial for Dresden? All Soviet security forces could be put on trial for the gulags? No one is brought on to give this common-sense criticism of the whole thing.)

Eli Rosenbaum and Efraim Zuroff gloat that the Demjanjuk case was significant because it brought on blood-guilt, collective-guilt, mass-guilt. Zuroff in 2010(?) on CNN: "If you served as an armed guard at a death camp, you are automatically guilty of mass murder." Zuroff in 2017 reflects: "The question then was, How many of these people were alive."

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(Comment: I'll say it again: This documentary has trailed off quite a ways on Holocaust tangents. By its 45-minute mark (of 76m30s run time, so near its 60% mark), it has hardly even talked about its nominal subject, Oskar Groening! The long tangent on Demjanjuk itself soaks up fourteen minutes, some 18% of run-time.)

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Tracking down the surviving, unpunished Nazis

The music now turns towards one of mystery. As if a detective story is afoot.

On screen is brought Jens Rommel ("Director, Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes"). People are seen shuffling through filing cabinets and storage facilities for evidence as Rommel says they began to "put together all these puzzle pieces" to track down the Nazis who had slipped through.

"There's slim pickings, these days, for Nazi war criminals," says a white-hair man identified as Jeff Ansell ("Former Journalist & Nazi Hunter"). (Ansell, b.1955, looks quite Jewish, to the point where I would be very surprised if he were not Jewish.) Ansell tells an anecdote from his Nazi Hunting past. Simon Wiesenthal tipped him off in the early 1980s about "a Nazi named Haralds Puntulis who was living in Canada [and] had taken part in the massacre of more than five thousands Jews and Roma in a village in Latvia." Ansell gloats about his success in tracking Puntulis down and 'exposing' him, but laments that Puntulis died before he could go on trial.

True Believer Rebecca Wittman is brought back on to say the "rush was on" to find Nazis. She endorses the idea that the state-apparatus must divert major resources to putting on trial all still-available Nazis. (She doesn't show any hint, at least in the clips shown, of shame over this.)

In this process, as the available pool of Nazis continued to shrink -- and we are shown an old document with names being crossed out for deaths or incapacitations -- "an accountant from Auschwitz" was singled out.

(Here, now at 46m30s, past the 60% mark in total run-time, the documentary finally gets around to dealing, in any serious way, with its own subject!).

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The decision to arrest Oskar Groening

A surprise here: The decision to prosecute Groening came because of a 2005 interview he gave to the BBC, then age 83 or 84. At one point, the BBC interviewer asks him if he thinks he should've been put on trial. Groening in 2005 answers: "Nein, das glaube ich nicht." The English voice-over says:

"You imply, with your question, that just being a member of a large group of people who lived in a garrison where the destruction of the Jews took place is enough to make you a criminal."

Jeff Ansell (the "Former Journalist & Nazi Hunter") says Groening "was an accomplice. He knew what he was doing." Ominous and vaguely sinister music returns as Jeff Ansell explains how Groening lived "for decades...in a small town outside Lüneburg," a Nazi tied to Auscwhitz among the unsuspecting small-town German rubes.

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A flabby, weak moral defense of Groening

Benjamin Ferencz, who as a young and energetic Jew had led an Einsatzgruppen prosecution in 1947, is brought back on, now at age 97, to defend bringing to trial elderly small-time players (much like himself, really, but from the other side), even as late as the 2010s. Ferencz is shown living in Palm Beach, Florida. His wife is also elderly. A Hispanic woman is apparently their live-in aide. Dismissing any idea that Groening, nearly the same age as Ferencz, deserved sympathy, Ferencz says one needs sympathy for "the victims" and not "the perpetrator," the latter referencing Groening. (This causal use of "the perpetrator" is a case of successful framing when one has media control. A small-time nobody as The Perpetrator, a monster. Fear! Fight!)

After the casual and definitive mega-slander of Groening ("The Perpetrator") by the near-centenarian Ferencz -- who gleefully wags his finger at European Christian Male "Nazis" in general, from his retirement home in Florida -- we meet Hans Holtermann, brought on for an opposing view. Holtermann is another of Groening's lawyers. He explains, in English, that Groening was not actually involved in any kind of killing.

The documentarians, whose voices are not heard, apparently had tried some leading questions here. The kind of question they tried is revealed in the answer: Holtermann says:

"Of course he [Groening] supported the system, but not the killing itself."

This is the extent of the moral defense of Groening in this documentary. It puts Groening, and really the German nation in a sense, immediately on the moral defense, and immediately makes Groening look like a weasel with a "just following orders" defense. That is the framing. It's a little forced and awkward, but I think would be effective on most casual viewers.

Earlier in the documentary, we heard a similar, brief defense of Demjanjuk from Ulrich Busch ("Demjanjuk's Lawyer"), who said, in English apparently in 2009:

"John Demjanjuk is just a scapegoat for the Germans."

The rest of the quote makes it clear what he was trying to say:

"[Demjanjuk] has to pay for all the mistakes they made in the past? That's not justice."

Ulrich Busch seemed to be saying: "It's true Germans are guilty, it's true the German justice system is guilty for going light on Nazis, but Demjanjuk himself is personally not particularly guilty." It's conceding the premise and a "tilted playing field," as usual. What more could be expect with the Groening case?

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Oskar Groening's "weasel defense"

Kristen Goetze ("German Prosecutor") comes back on, attacking former Nazis for using exactly the weasel-tactic just implied and framed for us. Frau Goetze characterizes this as weasel-word-using Nazis saying: "Well, I didn't kill them! They were killed by a machine!" Goetze asks rhetorically: "Who is responsible?"

Edith Raim ("Author, Nazi War Crimes Against Jews and German Post-War Justice") is brought on again (Note: Edith is listed as b.1965 and her wiki says she became highly interested in the Holocaust after seeing the TV series in the late 1970s.) Raim concedes that Groening was not a high-ranking officer.

We go back to the co-plaintiff and Auschwitz Survivor Bill Glieb. "Groening was a cog in the wheel. But the wheel couldn't have turned without that cog."

Dershowitz is back to press the attack:

"Individual killing is not a requisite. There is no evidence that Hitler personally killed anybody, or any Jew," but "everybody who was aware of what was going on at Auschwitz is both morally and legally guilty."

Even the accountant "made choices, throughout," Dershowitz says.

Fellow Jew Lawrence Douglas joins in to pile on: "Groening was not just an accountant! He was known as 'The Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,'" which might be misleading in his significance. Ominous music returns to guide the viewer in the proper emotional response. Heinrich Rothmann ("Lawyer to the Co-Plaintiffs") then makes a brief appearance to inform us that Groening was "on the Ramp," where (per Lawrence Douglas) the guards sorted people out on arrival at Auschwitz, some to be killed immediately, others to become prisoners. Unlabeled photos of peopled queued up, which seem to conveniently seem to align with the explanation given by Douglas, are shown. (A CODOH-Forum member once made a comment that stuck with me, to the effect that "Out of context photographs prove the Holocaust" to most people's standards.)

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Getting ready for the trial

Douglas says we know Groening was at Auschwitz for two full years, but the indictment (filed Sept. 2014) only focuses on a three-month period when trains were arriving with Jews from Hungary.

An animation of a train arriving in the camp is shown, stopping at the 'Judenrampe' area.

Prosecutor Thomas Walther is back: "The Hungarian action is the crime." Groening was charged with "knowingly assist[ing] others in the intentional murder by atrocities and cruel killings" of "at least" 300,000 Hungarian Jews, as shown on screen in the court filing. Walther says that if the prosecution can prove Groening was "on the Ramp" even one day during the period mid-May to mid-July 1944, "then he is guilty of the whole crime." (This seems somewhat shaky, but an further probing is literally legally punishable under the current German regime, so there will be only the flabbiest of push-backs, or none at all, on the premises. Guilt is assumed and virtually guaranteed.)

Next we see a scene at a dinner table which has the feel of possibly being staged after the fact. Prosecutor Thomas Walther is with two of the star witnesses, Bill Glieb and Max Eisen. The three are at a formal dinner table, in suits, wine glasses filled with water. Walther tells them: "Speak slowly but fluently. Don't think about the faces of the judges." They listen.

Next we see Bill Glieb getting dressed in a suit and adjusting his tie. "The time came for us to testify at the trial..."

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(To Be Continued, with the final 30% of the documentary, the actual contents of the Groening trial and more.)

[Sannhet]

[Continued]

(The third and final part)

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The Survivors' Testimony

On to the trial. Or so you'd think. Not quite! The documentary moves not to the trial, exactly, but to detailed descriptions of their camp memories by Bill Glied (I previously mistakenly wrote his name as "Glieb"), Hedy Bohm, Eva Mozes Kor, and Max Eisen (Auschwitz Survivors, Co-Plaintiffs). They describe to the camera what happened to them. Six minutes of this follows, with none of it relevant to being in any way relevant to Oskar Groening.

(Why do the documentarians avoid their nominal/titular subject, Oskar Groening, "The Accountant of Auschwitz"? He was the one on trial, he is the one they named the documentary for, one would think they would focus the story at least somewhat on him. Maybe some interviews with family members, family friends, anything like that. Basically, nothing. He hardly appears in his own documentary!)

Glied, Bohm, Eisen, and Kor were all adolescents when deported to Auschwitz, and by the time of the trial and documentary were into old age. They describe on camera the process of getting out of the train, the commotion of the arrival area, the presence of inmates, soldiers, dogs. Glied says the men and boys were put into one "column," women in another. Families were separated.

A look at each of the four featured survivors and their stories:

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EVA MOZES KOR

Eva was a twin. Upon deportation and getting off the train, she says she remembers "a Nazi yelling in German, 'Twins! twins!'" Eva's mother asked: "Is that good?" And the guard said: "Yes." They promptly separated them. Eva says this was the last time she saw her mother. The music turns ominous and sad.

Eva later starts talking about Mengele and she claims he used 1500 sets of twins "in his various experiments." She describes the supposed process like this:

"Take a set of twins, inject one with a disease; when that one dies, you kill the other other one, and then you get the results of how the disease works. After one of those injections, I became very ill, with a very high fever. Next morning, Mengele came in with four other doctors. He looked at my fever chart, and then he declared, laughing sarcastically, 'Too bad! She's so young, she has only two weeks to live.' But after two weeks, my fever broke.. I survived! And I was released and reunited with my twin sister and the other twins."

The documentarians show a filmreel they claim shows Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister, Miriam in "1945," among a group of women and children. All are dressed for winter. (One wonders where and when this was; all it says is "Eva and Miriam - 1945.")

Evaluating Eva Mozes Kor's claim that as a child she was part of a medical experiment under Mengele: It sounds like a botched memory, or one massaged into existence by the power of the greater Narrative. It's entirely possible that Eva was ill with a fever for two weeks while a camp inmate, given how diseases spread in the crowded conditions, and survived. But how would she have known what medical staff were injecting her with? There is no way she could have known. Because of course they didn't say: "Hey, little Jew, you are now being subject to an evil experiment, and will soon die! Heil Hitler!"

It is entirely possible her condition turned for the worse and a doctor did say nonchalantly that she had only two weeks to live but that she fought through and recovered. But the Mengele story and the medical experiment story don't make much sense as described. It sounds like something she picked up much later, a fractured memory of being sick (true), being visited by a doctor (true) but fragments of truth and true-memories being hijacked by The Big H cultural-behemoth of later decades, creating a false-memory, by which some camp doctor in her memory became "Mengele." She became an instant-celebrity, perhaps talked into it, coached into it. As we'll see below, Eva was something of a self-promoter.)

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HEDY BOHM

Hedy Bohm says that on arrival she was soon separated from her mother amid the commotion and the crowds. She rushed to catch up but "all of a sudden I was stopped, a rifle in front of me, and a young German soldier telling me: "Nein. Over there. To the right." He refused to let her get back to her mother. "And I never saw her again." The music is turned up on in volume and sadness-level.

Bohm: "That is...the hardest thing that ever happened to me." The camera stays on her, silent, as she sobs. "Even now I have trouble talking about it." Bohm says that for over half a century she couldn't talk about it. She does not mention gas chambers or mass executions, she simply says she never saw her mother again.

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MAX EISEN

Mas Eisen says that on arrival at Auschwitz, he was separated from his mother, siblings, grandparents, and aunts. "I know they were taken into a gas chamber of Crematoria II." (He doesn't say how he knows this.) He says he and an uncle were selected for slave labor. He says they were processed, heads shaved, and given a tattoo on the arm. He shows the camera a faded tattoo on his left arm. Whatever this tattoo once was, it is no longer legible.

Max Eisen seems to be something of a professional Holocaust Survivor. The casualness with which he says he "knows" his family members died in gas chambers suggest he is consciously coaching himself, even in real time, or had done so long ago. Not all the survivors say this. Bohm (at least in the footage we are shown) simply does not say what happened to her mother. Eva Mozes Kor doesn't mention gas chambers.

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BILL GLIED

We've followed Glied since the stat of the documentary off and on, including on a visit to Auschwitz, scenes from which both open and close the documentary. Glied is the real protagonist of this documentary and he gets the most sympathetic treatment of anyone.

Glied says: "What happened to my mom and my sister, I don't know. But I've never seen them again, never said Goodbye to them, they just disappeared from my life at that moment."

We are then taken to the "Holocaust Victims' Memorial, Auschwitz, Poland," closely following Bill Glied. He is looking through pages filled with names of people who allegedly died. These are on large print-outs along a wall. Glied says:

"Ah, here. Here is my father. Glied, Alexander. 1899, Petrovac, Yugoslavia. Murdered in Kaufering, Germany." "Here is my sister. Glied, Aniko, 1936. Subotica, Yugoslavia. Murdered in Auschwitz, Poland. " "Here is my mom. Glied, Miriam. 1907, Jaszkarajeno, Hungary. Murdered in Auschwitz, Poland." [Pointing to a large section of one page:] "All of these are Glieds, relatives. Uncles and aunts of mine."

Bill Glied's father's wartime fate is a little unclear to me. Presumably deported with the other Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944, he is listed as dying at "Kaufering," which I take to be Dachau. Was he transferred? Why would someone be transferred such a long distance out of a death camp and to (implied) another death camp? This is not commented on. (Simple narratives are preferred, of course. When any complication arises, it is ignored.)

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The documentary has spent six minutes on a close and sympathetic following of the survivors' testimony. We have now reached the 78% run-time mark still without seeing anything of the trial, or even paying much of any attention to Oskar Groening, the Accountant of Auschwitz! If they're going to shift things to actually covering their nominal subject, they'd better hurry.

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The Trial

Finally onto the trial in earnest. We see scenes of the local community center which has been converted into a court to accommodate the crowds and media circus for the political trial. People inside are in suits but the whole atmosphere looks a little pathetic, not with the normal dignity of a court. it feels like they're holding court in a small high school gym / sports hall.

We are finally shown Oskar Groening, after the briefest of introductions early in the documentary. He is a frail man in his nineties. His eyes give off a slightly "vacant" look, as happens with age-associated cognitive decline.. (I think the opening of this trial and therefore this scene is from April 2015, two months before Groening's 94th birthday.)

I would describe the way he looked in court in April 2015, almost exactly seventy years after the end of the war in Europe, as equal parts three things: (1) friendly, (2) frightened, and (3) confused.

The documentary basically does not allow him to speak, which is an editorial choice by the documentarians. I get the feeling that filming was not allowed during the trial itself, but surely there is some footage of him speaking. Apparently he spoke at length at the trial, spoke freely.

Some things Groening said at the trial are flashed at us. Ominous music accompanies the following, displayed on screen:

GROENING: I was told that all the people who couldn't work, were disposed of. ["disposed of" seems to be entsorgen]

Judge FRANZ KAMPISCH: What did you think about the people who were being 'disposed of'?

GROENING: Well, Jews were considered the enemies of Germany. They needed to be exterminated. That was part of the war.

In context, it would probably be clear that Groening was not giving his own opinion but characterizing a (supposed) prevailing opinion of the time). He is simply repeating standard-fare Holocaust-isms in part. But the way the documentary is crafted, some viewers, maybe most, will assume these are his own views.

Bill Glieb is outraged that Groening is less emotional in the trial than he thinks he should be. The Professional-Nazi-Grandson Rainer Hoess is trotted out again to nod along at how terrible it was that when Groening spoke, the survivors looked so horrified.

The documentarians then go with an anecdote:

GROENING: In November 1942, during my first time on the Ramp, there was a shocking incident. A Jewish mother arrived and hid her baby in a suitcase. The baby started crying. An SS corporal opened the suitcase, took the baby by the legs, and smashed it against the iron door of a truck...and the crying stopped.

Max Eisen and Hedy Bohm both condemn Groening. This despite no one even alleging that Groening did anything. He is just telling anecdotes of things he saw or heard. There is a vengefulness in their tones, is uncommented on by the documentarians (of course). They both repeat that part of their anger is Groening is unemotional on the stand.

Bill Glied says:

"I understand that they were brainwashed, but there comes a point where no matter how much you're brainwashed, when you see a baby being picked up and smashed against a door, and you say, 'This is fine'? 'This is okay'? 'This is acceptable'? You can't accept that."

The material from the trial that this documentary shows is disappointingly limited, really just Evil Nazi Narrative Reinforcement. Maybe they thought more detail on the trial would be boring to viewers.

As for the "suitcase baby" story, maybe it's true, or true in part, who's to say. But the Holocaust is more than isolated anecdotes of individual misbehavior or even isolated murders. I have to point this out: There there is nothing shown from the trial on gas chambers. I assume this means nothing on gas chambers was heard at the trial, or they'd have put it in. Also nothing on scale of deaths. Nothing to corroborate the central, driving, orthodox Auschwitz narrative as we know it.

We do get this: "Did a Jew have a chance to leave this place alive?" Groening replies: "Absolutely not." But, wait a minute, many Jews did leave the place alive, including the co-plaintiffs. So the "absolutely not" is wrong on its face.

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The Jews condemn Groening, with one dissenter

The three Jewish experts whose comments have appeared throughout the documentary return to condemn Groening specifically. These are Dershowitz, Rosenbaum, and Douglas.

The loquacious but dishonest (or misinformed?) Alan Dershowitz condemns Groening for his "decisions." Dershowitz seems to call, or at least compare, Groening to a "guard in Auschwitz leading people to their death," which is a dishonest characterization given that Dershowitz (presumably) knew that Groening was not a "guard." He then says Groening "had to know...that it can't be legal to murder infants, the elderly..."

Lawrence Douglas claims that zero SS officers or senior German officers "suffered serious, life-threatening consequences as a result of opting out." Eli Rosenbaum (Former Director, U.S. Dept. of Justice Office of Special Investigations and one of the chief persecutors of John Demjanjuk in the latter's late life) agrees and says no Germans were ever subject to severe punishment or execution for refusing "criminal orders."

The survivors Max Eisen and Bill Glied, apparently speaking at the later stages of the trial, again express their anger at Groening, how bad Groening is, but don't give specific reasons.

We have therefore heard from five Jews, one after another, about how bad Groening is; no nuance; no breaking of ranks. This is artificial consensus if I've ever seen one. But there is one dissenter, of a kind at least, and that is the slightly eccentric Eva Kor.

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Eva Mozes Kor Forgives, Embraces Groening

Eva Kor says this to the camera:

"I did not know how the interaction with him [Groening] would be. I did not know how he would be able to answer my questions. But nevertheless, I testified. And I said, right there in a German court, that I forgave him. Because I forgive all the Nazis."

Then we see text on the screen, apparently of something Eva Kor said in court:

KOR: I forgive you, as I have forgiven all the Nazis. The Nazi regime did not work. Share that with the youth, Mr. Groening!

Other survivors, and the Jewish experts like Dershowitz, are brought on. One after another they condemn Eva Mozes Kor for announcing she forgave Groening and "all the Nazis." In fact, it feels like most of the Jews featured in this documentary seems to chime in on this, effectively closing ranks and condemning Eva Mosez Kor for her public declaration of forgiveness. The choice of showing the video in this way also indicates that the documentarians, who are also Jews, are part of this "closing of ranks."

(This is an interesting display of Jewish power and how it works, of how Jews deal with those who break ranks and maintain message discipline. This is not something you would generally see among typical White-NW-European-Christian types.)

Some of the condemnations of Eva Kor:

Efraim Zuroff ("Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem"): "It's outrageous what she did! It's absolutely outrageous."

Survivor Max Eisen says: "It felt like the floor opened up and I fell right down into the basement" when Eva Kor said she "forgave" Groening. He expresses even more outrage that people in the public applauded when Eva announced forgiveness.

Survivor Bill Glied: "This woman must be crazy!"

Survivor Hedy Bohm, whose tone (along with Eisen's) is pretty much hostile in everything she says: "Forgiving those who tortured her, and who killed so many, so cruelly? Maybe she needs that forgiveness to go on, to stay mentally normal."

Heinrich Rothmann ("Lawyer to the Co-Plaintiffs"), who presumably is non-Jewish Christian-origin German, does not condemn Eva Kor, but does stress she that is a "victim," which is a strange thing to say when asked about the public forgiveness.

Eva Mosez Kor explains another dramatic incident related to her public forgiveness. On the last day at which she was at the trial:

The court session was over. He was still sitting at his desk. So I went up to Oskar Groening...

We then cut to video labeled "Eva's camera footage," in which Eva Kor is shown holding the hand of Oskar Groening. He holds one of her hands with both of his own and looks up. They are looking in each others eyes. She says, in English, "Appeal to your fellow Nazis, to make statements, because we, the survivors, they don't believe us. They say, 'Oh, we are Jews, we want to accomplish something.' But you, this is your good job, to make up for the bad job." Groening was nodding along, seeming to understand.

Eva: "Are you feeling okay?" Without a word, Groening moves to embrace Eva. She embraces him back. The documentary freezes on this scene. A moment later we hear a newscaster announce:

"An embrace between two people is touching people around the world. ...A Terra Haute woman is at the center of international attention. This after a courageous act of kindness that took social media by storm."

It appears Eva Mosez Kor had social media accounts and someone working a camera for her. She, or someone on her behalf, uploaded pictures or footage of the embrace. One is a tweet dated April 23, 2015. The many 'shares' on social media, from famous and non-famous people, are shown. California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote (April 26): "Amazing ---> Holocaust Survivor Eva Kor Embraces Former Nazi Guard Oskar Groning - ABC News." A tweet by someone named Pablo Byrne is shown, representing the usual public response; it reads: "Breathtaking and utterly inspirational: Holocaust survivor Eva Kor survived Josef Mengele, hugs former Nazi guard." Many other such social media posts are shown.

Max Eisen was angry about this: "The world press was all around her. Everybody caught onto this 'Forgiveness' business, you see." Eva Kor is shown talking to news cameras. The Wiesenthal Center's Efraim Zuroff is likewise furious, saying that Eva Kor had "succeeded in infuriating practically every other survivor around. And for good reason!"

Even the somewhat decadent Holocaust-guy Rainer Hoess is trotted out again and does his usual spiel. "They've asked me many times: 'You have to forgive your grandfather.' I said, 'No. I can't forgive him Not with all the stuff he put on our shoulders.'" But even with Rainer, the light of Christian Forgiveness shines through, somewhat, whereas it does not with the Jews shown. Rainer says: "It's up to her. If that's the way for Eva to live with it, I accept it."

The last words we hear from Eva Kor on the matter are:

"The best way to defeat an enemy is to make him a friend. I believe that I defeated Oskar Groening by making him a friend."

This is all a giant strawman, because Oskar Groening was never her enemy in the first place. She was also, in her old age, clearly living in the distant past and not in the 2010s, with her line to Groening appealing to him to "speak out to your fellow Nazis." (What Nazis does she mean? And as if Germany just needed one more anti-Nazi voice!)

In any case, the documentary spent quite a while on this Forgiveness thing, covering it about as negatively as possibly can be done for such a thing, soaking up four minutes of run time. Despite clearly leaning towards criticizing Eva for this, I think the typical viewer will be sympathetic to the whole thing. The actual video of the embrace is touching.

(What to make of Eva Kor? From hearing her speak and looking at her actions, including her publishing on social media of her "embrace with former Nazi guard," she seems to relish the attention and spotlight. This is her way to get positive and sympathetic attention in old age. I think this is a fairly common feature of many of the activist survivors, though certainly not all can be 'dismissed' that way, and nor can any be 'dismissed' for that reason alone. It is also curious, in this context, that Eva had some kind of relationship with professional-Nazi-grandson Rainer Hoess.)

(Eva Mosez Kor died in 2019; see: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12962).

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Oskar Groening's Life

We've now reached the 88.5% mark of the run-time of the documentary. Less than ten minutes remain. The documentarians now finally get around to giving some kind of biographical portrait of the nominal/titular subject of the documentary, Oskar Groening.

Kirsten Goetze (German Prosecutor involved with the cases against Demjanjuk) informs us that Groening returned to his hometown region after the war ended, married the widow of his brother, and had two children. No mention of his brother died, presumably in the war. (That would be interesting information, wouldn't it? Why was it not included? Is it because it might detract from the monopoly on Jewish suffering?)

Goetze continues on Groening's life: "And of course he lived a peaceful life and he enjoyed life." We are shown a picture of Groening relaxing in a photograph which looks to be from some summer day in the 1960s or so. Groening is relaxing. His hair is still blond. He has on sunglasses, eyes closed, dog at his side.

This was very brief life sketch, covering 1945 until at least the mid-1980s. At least forty years, glossed over in fifteen seconds, very late in the documentary. Why was this kind of info not at the beginning, and not in substantially more depth? This is really strange, when one notices it and thinks about it. The man is all but de-personed in a documentary which is (in theory) about him. This keeps striking me.

Next we hear Groening's lawyer Hans Holtermann explain the story of how Groening came to be involved in The Holocaust, by way in fact of Holocaust Revisionism. This is a story known since early 2005 when Groening did a BBC interview. On this, see 2005 CODOH-Forum thread, "Nazi's testimony / Oskar Groening."

Holtermann says:

"A very important thing for Mr. Groening was in the middle of the Eighties, he was meeting somebody who was collecting stamps like he himself did, they were talking about the Nazi crimes and the other person denied the Holocaust." .... "He made some interviews to the German news-magazine Spiegel and to the BBC. Before these interviews, nobody knew Mr. Groening."

Not mentioned in the documentary is the story that Groening supposedly wrote a letter to his stamp-collecting acquaintance in the middle or late 1980s affirming the Holocaust happened which was then then printed for ridicule in a "neo-Nazi magazine." On this story, which is frankly more compelling that most of what is in this documentary ('vanilla' Holocaust Narrative), see the 2005 CODOH-Thread on Groening. The Guardian wrote this about him in 2005:

Gröning said nothing to contradict these statements. But the attempt to deny the reality of Auschwitz, the site of the largest mass murder in history, upset him and made him angry. He obtained one of the Holocaust deniers' pamphlets that his fellow stamp collector had recommended, wrote an ironic commentary on it, and posted it to the man from the philately club.

Suddenly, he started to get phone calls from strangers who disputed his view. It turned out that his denunciation of the Holocaust deniers' case had been printed in a neo-Nazi magazine. The calls and letters he received "were all from people who tried to prove that Auschwitz was a huge mistake, a big hallucination, because it hadn't happened". But Gröning knew very well it had happened - for he was posted to Auschwitz in September 1942, as a 22-year-old member of the SS. Almost immediately he witnessed the arrival of Jews at the camp. [...]

At the time, CODOH-Forum member Carto's Cutlass Supreme wrote:

I'm supposed to believe that he made a commentary on a pamphlet and the next thing you know he's getting calls and letters because his name and address were printed in a neo-Nazi magazine?" C'mon.

And he's an old man in a stamp collector club? Talk about "mild mannered reporter" or "milktoast." Do you really think you'd meet some whack dude who's going to print your name in a neo-nazi magazine if you disagree with him at a stamp collector club? That wouldn't even happen if you attended 100 Nazi skinhead retreats, let alone a freakin' stamp collector club.

But the documentary does not mention the neo-Nazi magazine. (With the resources available today, if the nei-Nazi magazine anecdote is true, could it not be located and confirmred?)

In any case, Efraim Zuroff and Lawrence Douglas both re-appear to condemn the unidentified Stamp-Collecting Holocaust Denier from thirty years earlier. Douglas characterizes Groening's response in the 1980s as: "Look, I was there. I know that these crimes were committed!" (But, strange, now in the waning few minutes of the documentary, still nothing about Groening witnessing gas chambers. It has not been mentioned directly.)

The documentary then quotes from Groening's 2005 BBC interview, at age 84:

I see it as my duty now, at my age, to face up to the things that I witnesses, and to oppose the Holocaust deniers who claim that Auschwitz never happened.

I want to tell those deniers, "I have seen the crematoria. I have seen the burning pits. And I want you to believe me that these atrocities happened. . .
I was there.

So here is Groening saying he saw "crematoria" and "burning pits." But no mention of gas chambers. Apparently there was a false version of this quote going around which inserted "gas chambers." (See a letter to David Irving, "What Gröning Really Said," April 2005, which Irving published.)

Groening is then shown at home, in the 2000s, at his desk. A scrapbook is in front of him; he page is open to two pictures of himself during WWII. On his wall there hangs a sign, in German, a prayer, which is also well known in English and presumably many other languages: "To accept the things I cannot change; the Courage to change the things I can; And the wisdom to know the difference." (This, and much else about Groening, suggests to me that is a typical German Protestant Christian of his generation, maybe would identify as a Lutheran. And not just a passive one but to some degree at least an active believer. That is, Groening was loyal to his people's traditions, and his religion meant something serious to him. Some of his statements on his "guilt" must be interpreted in this light or a miscommunication is going on.)

So Groening had been actively speaking out by the mid-2000s. No good deed goes unpunished, and by the mid-2010s he was charged and convicted, the last years of his life hounded by these trials and appeals.

Peter Singer (Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University) is brought back on to say this of Groening: "He exposed himself, and that was a positive thing to do, clearly, a courageous thing to do...a very important extenuating circumstance. To me that would have been sufficient reason to not prosecute him." But prosecuted, he was. (The reasons for doing so are complicated and really political in nature, but no attempt is made by the documentarians to broach this delicate subject at all.)

__________________

Groening as Morally Guilty

We are shown footage of Groening wheeling himself along as the press surround him and ask questions. On screen flash some more of his court (?) statements:

"For me, there is no question that I am morally guilty. I ask for forgiveness. Whether I am criminally responsible, you must decide."

These are the words of a Christian (see my comment above on the prayer hanging on the wall of Groening's study). These words are essentially a prayer. "I am guilty, I ask for forgiveness" is the basis of much Christian prayer.

The (secular?) Jews who made this documentary probably thought this was a "smoking gun." Groening 'confessed'! There is a real culture-gap here. the documentarians probably don't understand that this is (or could be, at least) the language of a sincere Christian essentially declaring his faith. He was doing an open prayer before the court in the way one does at a church. This kind of wording says very little about the specific claims of the Holocaust, and more about Groening's own disposition.

Groening knew the end of his life was near, and using this public stage, he was declaring himself a Christian (as I see it). This alone does not fully explain why he'd say what he did with this "I am morally guilty," but I think it explains a lot of it. Everything in Germany, and elsewhere, is now filtered through the Holocaust, and the Christian works through the political reality of the time. A large majority have more-or-less made peace with this, and clearly Groening had. In other words, the motivation for saying he is morally guilty is a Christian motivation, and not one stemming from decades of repressed guilt over shoving people into gas chambers (or whatever people might believe about Groening, absent any evidence or further information).

(Relatedly: Eva Mosez Kor's decision to publicly "forgive" Groening, and their embrace, is recognizable as what a sincere Christian is supposed to do. The universal condemnation of the Jews in this documentary against Eva's action, in which they are baffled and/or angered, appears also to be a sign of this cultural gap. The Jews can be very skilled at existing in Western-Christian societies, but there remains a psychological gap. This documentary is the worse for it. They not only fail to understand Groening, they don't even try.)

Hans Holtermann (Groening's lawyer) is then back on, at a press conference during the trial, speaking English, repeating Groening's statement about his moral guilt. Then ex-68'er prosecutor Thomas Walther says at a German press conference in 2015, saying that Groening is not "play-acting sick" as Demjanjuk had. (A strange form of praise, if that's what it is.)

___________________

Groening disproves the Holocaust Deniers?

Alan Dershowitz is brought back on (the man, who has no relation to anything in this story, gets much more screen time than Oskar Groening himself, after whom the documentary is named!). He attacks Holocaust Revisionists:

"[Groening] puts the lie to all the Holocaust Deniers who say there were no gas chambers, there were no crematoria, that there was no Zyklon. He puts the lie to all of that. He was there! He saw it with his own eyes. And yet the Holocaust Deniers can't accept the reality of what he's saying. And he deserves some credit for having testified to the truth of what he saw."

While Dershowitz is slamming the Holocaust Deniers (strawmanning them as denying there were crematoria or Zyklon), ominous music plays as we see pictures of anti-Holocaust graffiti. One is a spraypainted wall with "Holocaust is Fake History!" (with the letter 'S' replaced with $ in each word); another has: "Holocaust Never Happened [smiley face]" while another shows a poster for Holocaust Memorial Day defaced with "LIARS."

The "Holocaust Denier" position as presented by Dershowitz and the documentarians is one of crazy delusion, rage against "reality."

___________________

The importance of Holocaust Belief and of bolting down the Holocaust as the center of Western Culture; the Groening trial's role therein

In the last six minutes of the documentary, we get a shift in tone away from pretense of anything like either the (promised but not delivered) biography of the Accountant of Auschwitz or anything related to the Holocaust generally or Auschwitz specifically. These last minutes shift hard towards "What does this all mean for us today?"

The loud-mouthed Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center is back on, speaking as film-reel of emaciated bodies is shown. He says that when the camps were discovered in 1945, people coined the phrase "Never Again." But then this:

"The only problem is, there's nothing behind it! In other words, there have been so many tragedies, similar but not equal to the Holocaust, over the years, that this 'Never Again' basically is absolutely meaningless.

The elderly former Nuremburg prosecutor Benjamin Ferecz is brought back on. He says the world is very dangerous today and that "our capacity to kill is getting completely out of hand." This is something Ferecz, b.1920, could've sad at really any time in his adult life). He mentions Syria and ISIS and says: "It's nothing new."

As Ferencz and Zuroff are warning of world dangers, we are shown scenes of a North Korean military parade and Kim Jong Un waving to people, then WWII footage of a bombing of a city, then an ISIS flag, then footage of an apparent Ku Klux Klan cross-burning in which they're also burning a Swastika (is this something anyone does?). Then footage of a Black-African boy looking over a pit of covered corpses. As that image is shown, Zuroff says:

Part of the reason you had cases like Rwanda, and Cambodia, and Biafra, and Darfur, and Bosnia, and all of these things, is that it's not at all clear if you participate in such crimes, you actually have to pay for it. Again and again and again, people got away with it. That's it! It's absolutely terrible!

Max Eisen, the professional Holocaust Survivor, then comes on to say: "If you don't learn from the past, we repeat the same mistakes."

Now we're really getting down to brass tacks: Right as Max Eisen is warning about repeating past mistakes, on screen we are shown footage from the Aug. 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, rally to defend the Robert E. Lee statue. White men with torches march in the park area near the statue and chant: "Jews -- will not -- replace us! Jews -- will not -- replace us!" followed by a scene of scuffling labeled "Charlottesville, Virginia." After this we're shown a scene of a political rally labeled "Athens , Greece" as the banner of the Golden Dawn party is visible. Then a scene labeled "Newcastle, England" of men doing Hitler salutes and someone shouting "Sieg Heil!" Then a scene labeled "Warsaw, Poland" of some kind of nationalistic-looking rally.

Dershowitz comes back on screen:

"We can send a message that there is no statute of limitations on genocide, it could have an impact on preventing individuals from risking prosecution even at the end of their lives."

Comment: I don't believe Zuroff and Dershowitz at their word here, i.e., that the purpose of now-almost-absurdly-endless Nazi trials is preventing genocide in Africa or somewhere at some future time. Or maybe what I really mean is I don't believe that is the documentarians' goal, because this documentary is their product, and everything we see is from their editing, and also often their leading questions.

So what is the real goal? I think the real goal with pushing these trials is revealed specifically by the choice of footage they show at this point: All the scariest scenes they show are of White-Christian nationalistic types. Another goal could be the Endless Intervention Wars, providing a major moral-political propping-up to interventionism. "Prevent another holocaust, invade Syria now!" This kind of thing. All the US-led wars of our time tend to use the Holocaust to justify them, to one degree or another.

_________________________

The Verdict in the Groening Trial

There are now just four minutes left in the documentary. The verdict is to be announced. Ominous music, carried over from the montage of scary scenes of dupes and evil people repeating the mistakes of history (here, the Charlottesville rally) continues.

On screen we see The Times of Israel with a July 15, 2015, headline: "Verdict due in German trial of 'Bookkeeper of Auschwitz'." Sub-heading: "94-year-old who served as 'accountant' of confiscated Jewish property is 'very sorry'; prosecution wants 3.5 years in jail."

Exciting music accompanies us back to the community center serving as a courthouse. Police are milling around; lots of media people and camera teams. Groening pulls up in a red car, gets out of the passenger side, very slowly, and grips a walker set out for him. Besides being slow moving, he looks slightly confused. This is partly due to being unaccustomed to the attention, I am sure, but also because of the general effects of age. Not all are blessed enough to stay mentally spry in their nineties.

Survivor Bill Glied then makes the surprising confession that he doesn't actually want Groening to go to jail. He explains he wants Groening humiliated and wants "people to see him walk on the street and say, 'There goes Oskar Groening, the man who got convicted in the murder of three hundred thousand people.'"

Survivor Hedy Bohm says this of Groening: "He's all we have. And if we want to establish as precedent, a new law that in the future will not allow the guilty to escape on technicalities, we do it through him." (The 'technicality' here is that Groening is not even accused of being part of any killings! Quite a big technicality!) Later, Bohm says:

"This is for future generations! For all those people who are still murdering people because they're of a different color, different tribe, different religion. It is for them to know that judgement, no matter how long it will take, will catch up with them."

Groening is shown in court, looking awkward and half-confused, again, as we shift to another world: The slick presentation of the whole affair in the US Mainstream Media, the kind of place through which millions would briefly see the story and get Narrative Reinforcement. (Mission Accomplished.) We see Lester Holt of NBC News pronounce the following:

An extraordinary moment in Germany, when the sins of World War Two finally caught up with the man known as "The Accountant of Auschwitz." He was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison, in what is likely one of the last Nazi trials we will ever witness.

Holt, reading his teleprompter in July 2015, some five years and six months ago as of this writing, was wrong that it was likely the last Nazi trial. Bafflingly, they seem to be continuing even into the 2020s. As Holt spoke, an image appeared behind him on this NBC News broadcast saying simply this: "NAZI TRIAL," and showing the 94-year-old face of Groening, fading to his appearance in the 1940s in SS uniform.

Now we return to the commotion of the courthouse area. Groening's lawyer Hans Holtermann says (in German) to the press that they will appeal but says the verdict was "not very surprising." This is all rather anti-climactic.

_________________

The Jews as "the Eternal Phoenix"

Now down to the final ninety seconds of the documentary, we are told by words on screen that Groening lost his appeals. The survivors Bohm and Glied are shown celebrating the verdict at some kind of press conference of their own.

Glied says:

"The fact that I am sitting in a German court, with my daughter, with my granddaughter, proves that we, like the eternal phoenix, rise again from the Holocaust ashes, that we can survive!"

The music is crescendoing into sad tones. We return to Auschwitz in the 2010s, accompanying BIll Glied who looks contemplative but says no more. The documentarians gave him the final spoken words of the documentary with his "We (presumably meaning the Jews) can survive." On screen we see this:

Oskar Groening died in March 2018 without having served a day in prison.

Since the Groening trial, 8 former SS officers have been indicted and more than 19 are under investigation.

The youngest one is 92.

The last moment of the documentary before the credits roll says this: "In memory of Bill Glied (1930-2018)."

______________

The Credits

The credits are worth a look for the large numbers of Jews involved in the production, including the entirety of the senior positions (director, writer, all producers):

Produced by:
Ricki Gurwitz
Ric Esther Bienstock

Directed by:
Matthew Shoychet

Edited by:
Ted Husband

Original music by:
Ken Myhr

Written by:
Ricki Gurwitz

Executive Producer:
Randi Kirshenbaum

Executive Producers:
Berry Meyerowitz
Jeff Sackman
Jordan Nahmias

Director of Photography:
Luke McCutcheon

Additional Camera:
Brad Silverberg
Mike Yablonski
Trent Watts
Fabian Bettinger
Randy Valdez
Chris McKissick
Christopher Danckers
Jakob Speiswinkel

[...]

Researcher:
Rick Gurwitz

[...]

Special Thanks:
Andrew Heppner
Dennis Gurwitz
Frances Gurwitz
Bruce Cowley
Robin Mirsky

(and about forty others, with something like half the names appearing Jewish.)

Produced with the participation of:
The CANADA MEDIA FUND
Rogers Documentary Fund
Rogers Cable Network Fund

With the assistance of:
CANADA: The Canadian Film or Video Production Credit
ONTARIO: Ontario Media Development Corporation, Film and Television Tax Credits

Produced in association with:
Documentary Channel

Sandra Kleinfeld - Senior Director - Documentary Channel
Jordana Ross - Production Executive - Documentary Channel
and
HOLLYWOODSuite.

A TLNT Production
in association with
Good Soup Productions Inc.
aqute media

So Canadian taxpayer money went to this documentary, and it was an almost all-Jewish production team.

I think Ricki Gurwitz is the key mover here, the driving force behind this documentary. She has credits as "Researcher," "Writer," and the lead "Producer" credit, and given that two of the top-three most prominently placed "Special Thanks" people share her surname (parents?). Not much info is available on Gurwitz, but it appears she was born in the early or mid 1980s in Toronto, had a 2009-2015 career in the media in New York City before starting the Accountant of Auscwhitz project in 2015, involved with it through the end in 2017 and then promoting it at film festivals in 2018. By late 2019 and 2020, it was widely available. I am sure it is in circulation on TV.

________________________

Final thoughts, What would have been a better way to make this film

First let me say: Thank you for reading, if you still are reading. I hope you got something out of my efforts.

There were a lot of individual tidbits of interest scattered throughout this documentary, The Accountant of Auscwhitz, which is why I decided to take on the considerable project of doing such a close-in summary and commentary, amounting in three parts to some 14,000 words. No small project!

As I have interspersed throughout my comments, there was a lot "lacking" in this documentary. Don't get me wrong, I think it works as propaganda. It's not badly made in that sense. Propaganda can be self-limiting, though. In this case, we get very little, almost no, actual focus on Groening the man. We get little or nothing on the trial as a controversy.

The decision to run this trial should be controversial to anyone. It amounts to a "political show trial," with a preordained outcome, about something that happened to other people seventy years earlier. A criminal trial with a real defendant (an old man in his last years who was nearby but didn't really do anything). It is clearly being put on for symbolic purposes. These are really problematic, all of it.

What was really going with this trial, and others like them? Why were they doing this? There are implications for German and Western-world politics and power-relations and for what is called "regime legitimacy." Even starting to explore down this avenue would have been a much more interesting documentary than what this documentary was. I mean, if "Should the Groening trial have happened?" were presented as the central controversy, not relegated to a small number of sidebar comments (Peter Singer says several times that Groening should NOT have been charged, there should not have been a trial, but these statements are just one-offs and not part of the narrative; the documentary is really worse for it). The documentarians did not have the courage or the interest to do this, and have preferred a mostly-standard-issue Holocaust repackaging, with the nominal subject in a marginal role in his own documentary.

Maybe someone else will make a documentary of that kind at some point, an honest look at why these endless Nazi trials happen. That is still probably too much to ask in our time, but one day.

As for the more specific and down-to-Earth criticism that they ignored Oskar Groening in "his own" documentary, I think this is really strange. There are some compelling stories here. The whole thing with the Neo-Nazi magazine stamp-collector guy. Why not dig into that? Did the documentarians even attempt to interview Groening himself (who was still living when the documentary was produced and finished, dying a few weeks before it appeared in its first film festival), or any of his friends or family? They make no indication that they did. Disappointing.

_____________________

What is the relevance of Oskar Groening?

Groening has a place in history, but not for the minor role he had for a period of WWII at Auschwitz. His place in history is really within the narrative of The Holocaust vs. Holocaust Revisionism. It starts, by his telling, in the mid- or late-1980s, when he first heard someone "deny the Holocaust." In his 2005 BBC appearance he specifically said the Deniers are wrong because he was there and saw "the crematoria" and "the burning pits."

The semi-farcical trial, at the very end of his life, included overtones of Disproving the Deniers. This is explicitly argued for by Alan Dershowitz and others in the documentary. The reporting on the trial, in 2014 and 2015, also served the purpose, in its time, of regularly scheduled Holocaust Narrative Reinforcement (NBC News' "the crimes of the past finally caught up to another ex-Nazi..."), which is of course beneficial to various interested parties.

Despite this documentary's frustrating lack of attention on its own nominal subject (e.g., by glossing over up to fort-five years of his life in fifteen seconds), the existence of this fairly-well-publicized documentary also puts Groening in a place of importance in history, a very late comer to the Holocaust controversy. The details matter much less than the 'meme' ("Accountant of Auschwitz" admits Holocaust, asks forgiveness). It's possible millions will have seen this documentary soon, through one medium or another. The details are unexplored but few will ask the right, critical questions, or dig deeper. I assure you that no one can watch this documentary without getting the strong impression that Groening "confessed to it all," and "confirmed that it all happened." But what did he confess to?

Finally, looking ahead to the future. Whenever it is that the power of the Holocaust narrative is finally broken, the Groening trial of 2014-15 will have relevance then, too, maybe even moreso than ever, as illustrating the political purposes served by the Holocaust as cultural-political force. The same goes for this documentary. I think anyone who is thinking at all along any kind of the wavelength "the Jews as a people" (rather than, for example, someone watching who imagines Dershowitz and Zuroff and all the other Jewish experts and commentators that appear in this documentary are just free-floating individuals), such a person cannot but see what use the Holocaust serves to them and how they do it, including the remarkable and total closing of ranks to condemn Eva Kor for forgiving the "Nazi" Groening.

I also do think Groening could be a clear case of a White-NW-European-Christian archetype relevant to the Holocaust Narrative and its power over us, the kind of person who goes (has gone) along with the Holocaust Narrative, unwilling to question it, for certain reasons of his own -- not necessarily that he is a dupe or paid-off to lie or somesuch. Another relevant archetype is Hans-Juergen Brennecke, the 'Antifa' ex-68'er man, in his early seventies in the documentary period. Brennecke is featured in the early part of the documentary and is a Holocaust Fanatic. Besides that, he makes the remarkable confession that he and his local 'Antifa' group collaborated with German state prosecutors on it. The unseen documentarians, including the lead figure here, Rick Gurwitz, are also an archetype of Holocaust Propagandists, and many of those featured in the interviews of the documentary are Holocaust Enforcers.

With this, I end. Thanks for reading! (If anyone has just read all this straight through, I salute you.) I hope there are people gets some use out of this, in the 2020s and beyond, who find some of this useful (including the fact that this is all now "searchable" using ctrl-f).

[Archie]

Welcome back, Sannhet. Good to see you posting again.

A couple of thoughts.

Eva Mozes Kor: In her stories she talks about the horrible "medical experiments" she and her twin sister were subjected to. But if you strip the story down it sounds like all that happened is she got some shots and had some blood drawn. And was provided with medical care for various illnesses by the evil Nazis. "We don't know what was in those injections!" She does not consider that maybe it was just a shot. Rather she can't help but add in sinister elements from her own imagination. Her sister Miriam died of kidney cancer in 1993(!) and she assumes this was because of Mengele and his experiments!



Alan Dershowitz: It's been several months since I watched this doc but I still remember this part very well.

Alan Dershowitz is brought back on (the man, who has no relation to anything in this story, gets much more screen time than Oskar Groening himself, after whom the documentary is named!). He attacks Holocaust Revisionists:

"[Groening] puts the lie to all the Holocaust Deniers who say there were no gas chambers, there were no crematoria, that there was no Zyklon. He puts the lie to all of that. He was there! He saw it with his own eyes. And yet the Holocaust Deniers can't accept the reality of what he's saying. And he deserves some credit for having testified to the truth of what he saw."

I was floored by this part. Really extraordinary. No crematoria?! No Zyklon?! No revisionist has taken such a position, certainly not in any of the standard revisionist publishing venues like JHR or Castle Hill. A guy as smart as Dershowitz has to know better.

Lawrence Douglas: This guy is a law professor. He wrote a book on the Demjanjuk case called The Right Wrong Man. What he's getting at with that title is, well, sure, OSI framed him up as Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka and that was all bogus, but he probably did something during the war so it's all good.

Incidentally, there is another documentary called The Devil Next Door about the Demjanjuk trial. Douglas is featured here as well. We had a thread about it not too long ago.
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13634

[Otium]

Groening "saw it" and we're supposed to believe that because he said it? This is supposed to be some kind of "gotcha" moment? I cannot believe the chops on these people to pretend like this means so much more than it really does. That they have no good evidence for their claim should be obvious when they're so heavily pushing more testimonials to be enough to satisfy revisionists. Clearly it satisfies them, because their bar for evidence is so low, because they have so little.

[Hektor]

I.....
Ursula Haverbeck interview stopped by police.jpeg
Some other commotion of protestors is shown. "Thomas Wulff, Holocaust Denier" is then show demanding access to the trial but blocked police. Meanwhile the anti-fascist protestors are out with a banner that says "Justice for the Victims of Auschwitz," and two among them carry a large Israeli flag.

Footage of the trial is next, interspersed with commentary from the star witnesses we've met, Bill Glied and Hedy Bohm ("Auschwitz Survivor, Co-Plaintiff"). Now we also meet another Auschwitz survivor, Max Eisen. He tells the camera, "No one should be able to get away with crimes against humanity, against Jews." Another is Eva Mozes Kor. She explains she was good friends with Rainer Hoess, who she says "is a big advocate against the Neo-Nazis." Cut immediately to a man with a greying beard looking very relaxed, identified on screen as Rainer Hoess. "I am the grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp." Rainer says his grandfather "was responsible for 1.1 to 1.3 million killings." Rainer says the trial against Oskar Groening is important because it gives the chance to "listen to the perpetrators."

....
____________________

Apparently Rainer Hoess has a brother Kai Hoess, who had a somewhat different narrative to tell than his more (in)famous brother:

I thank Kai Höss for agreeing to provide an insight into his life, especially his family history, childhood and youth, in order to better assess him, but also his younger brother Rainer Höss. As in so many families of former Nazi greats, it is difficult to distinguish between family legend and a clear view of what happened, but Kai Höss succeeded because he has and had a great deal of distance between himself and his family, and his own idea of ​​family with his wife and four children. But without denying responsibility for his origins, because he is and will remain the grandson of the mass murderer Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz.

But unlike his brother Rainer, he doesn't go public with it. The following text explains why he did it.
https://sunday-news.info/kai-hoess-oeff ... it-willen/

His mother visited Kai and his family, in Bali and in Dubai, always accompanied by her younger son Rainer, and Rainer in particular was extremely impressed by his brother's "luxury life". When you get to know Rainer Höß and he talks about his life, he is said to be a worldly top chef with experience abroad, but then sees the stages of Kai's life in black and white, then you get a hunch that none of this can be right, what Rainer Höß says so, confirms. Yes, you also have to recognize that Rainer Höß made his brother's CV his own and unfortunately still does today.

But now we have a witness to Rainer Höß's childhood and youth, namely his older brother Kai. Kai vehemently denies that the subject of National Socialism was a role within the family. He has never heard anything from his father in this regard and only when Kai was confronted with this time at school did his mother, in his father's absence, explain his grandfather's horrible story to him. Even when visiting his grandmother Hedwig Höß, the widow of the mass murderer, this time was never an issue. He remembers his grandmother as a very correct lady who had absolutely nothing in common with his other grandmother's farming environment. He, the older brother, had never noticed National Socialist tones from his grandmother, his brother Rainer describes it quite differently in "his" book, Hedwig Hoess and his father are described as ardent National Socialists. Kai also has very different memories of a visit to the former chauffeur of camp commandant Rudolf Höß, Leo Heger. For one thing, he was not aware of the origin of grandmother Hedwig's acquaintance with the older gentleman, nor did he treat Hedwig's two grandchildren in any way differently than children were used to in the early 1970s. He certainly did not take on a quasi-grandfather position with the Höß brothers, as Rainer Höß also explains in "his" book. According to Kai, as long as Grandma Hedwig lived in Ludwigsburg, her grandchildren were more often with her. Nothing about their furnishings, their books, or the photos standing around in frames was in any way reminiscent of the Nazi era or of Auschwitz itself. Kai remembers that she was always meticulously tidy, at home she always wore a white, starched apron and her demeanor was ladylike, but warm to her grandchildren. Devotional items of any kind were never within sight or reach of the children. Kai and Rainer liked being with Grandma Hedwig because it was a little bit different from the rural life at home.

But whoever Hedwig was dating outside of her own children, she was very adept at disguising them. It is also unlikely that she should have indoctrinated the youngest grandson Rainer in such a way that the older brother should not have noticed anything about it. Especially since Hedwig Höß later moved to her daughter in Fulda and then only rarely had contact with her grandchildren. Hedwig Höß did not take the mementos of the time in Auschwitz with her to her daughter in Fulda, she deposited all of them in the cellar of her son Hans-Jürgen, that it said unnoticed in the corner. The father never showed any interest in it. This is also attested by the fact that he left the things in his wife's house when he left her, they were not important to him. Kai also resolutely denies the brutal corporal punishment on the part of his father that is described in the book. He describes his father as rather passive, gentle and de-escalating, although he well remembers that his mother often criticized the father for not being strict enough with the boys

There is, among other things, an episode in his brother's work, which deals with a neighboring family of Jewish faith, whose contact Rainer Höss was forbidden by his father without explanation and because he defied this ban, he was badly beaten, of course by Father. Kai tells something completely different here: Yes, there were these Jewish neighbors, they had two sons and the children played together regularly. Sometimes the boys next door ate with the Höß family, sometimes Rainer and Kai ate with the neighbors. There were never any disparaging remarks about the neighbors, neither from the mother nor from the father; On the contrary, one day one of the boys next door was badly burned and Father Höss immediately rushed to help and drove the boy to the hospital.

Rainer Höß was also never at a well-known boarding school, but in a youth facility in Hechingen. This was caused by the parents because the marital escalation was increasing and they wanted to protect their youngest, irrepressible son. At that time, Kai had already left home. Ergo, there was also no "Jewish" gardener at a luxury boarding school who harassed the young Rainer Höß because of the family connection to his grandfather.

So much for Rainer's story telling.

Kai Hoess seems to be a pastor of sorts:
https://www.biblechurchofstuttgart.de/our-leaders

Probably a bit more honest than his more (in)famous brother.

I guess investigating the story of them will turn out that the family (except for the Holohuckster Rainer) are decent people. And that includes the grandmother Hedwig. Well, the maligned granddad as well. In that light, the hole Holocaust of gassing millions in Auschwitz makes absolutely no sense. So why accept it as 'best explanation'? It for sure isn't.

[hermod]

What was interesting is that towards the end of the film, Gröning claimed that the Holocaust did occur, because he saw burning pits and crematoria. Which of course raises the question, why would he convict himslef in this way, by admitting to these atrocities, which indeed, never occurred?

Atrocities?!? I never understood why rotting under the ground (burial) is supposed to be better than being reduced to ashes by fire (cremation).

Just a cultural custom or another.

Which of course raises the question, why would he convict himslef in this way, by admitting to these atrocities, which indeed, never occurred?

When you're a former member of a group labelled as a criminal organization, being useful to the almighty victors by collaborating with them is of course the best way to stay away from the victors' kangaroo courts and gallows.

[Hektor]

....

Which of course raises the question, why would he convict himslef in this way, by admitting to these atrocities, which indeed, never occurred?

When you're a former member of a group labelled as a criminal organization, being useful to the almighty victors by collaborating with them is of course the best way to stay away from the victors' kangaroo courts and gallows.

Oskar Groening did 'come out' as a Holocaust Believer only later in live. At earliest in the late 1970s, more likely is during the 1980s. What triggered this was somebody confronting him with the Christophersen booklet on Auschwitz. That is 30 to 40 years past world war two. And after quite some bombardment via the media with their Auschwitz Narrative. He was never tried before, although it was known that he worked in Auschwitz as an accountant. He'd known that the crematoria were there, since that can be seen from the outside. He could not possibly have seen the gas chambers that were supposedly in the basement. He was essentially there as a tax collector.


According to Rees, this is what he said long prior to his coming out:
Once, shortly aer his return to Germany, he was sitting at the dinner table with his father and his parents-in-law and “they made a silly remark about Auschwitz,” implying that he was a “potential or real murderer.” “I exploded!” says Groening. “I banged my fist on the table and said, ‘This word and this connection are never, ever, to be mentioned again in my presence, otherwise I’ll move out!’ I was quite loud, and this was respected and it was never mentioned again.” Thus did the Groening family settle back and begin to make a future for itself in post-war Germany, enjoying the fruits of the German economic miracle.

I guess he was familiar with the accusations already then. But still a 'Holocaust Denier'. It's plausible that he was one of those that 'only heard about this after the war' and hence was wondering already what he was actually doing in Auschwitz. Whenever the concentration camps came up in German media and hence also private conversations among people... It would be in connection with gassing accusations. Repetition und Association are what will make most people believe in a story. It should not surprise that this would also apply to some of the former SS-men deployed at Auschwitz. Once they buy the story, they can get very defensive about their 'new discovery', especially when they are uncertain about this belief.

There is another thing with the Christophersen booklet. If Christophersen can say it's a lie, why can't others do it. In fact, why didn't more 'come out' on the open 'denier' side? That's because the Holocaust became a raison d'être for post-war Germany. And it was pervasive for a very long time. This goes as far as Churches semi-officially opposing German reunification based on 'what we did to the Jews'. And it is a widespread believe, which permeates both pietists and more liberal Protestants... While I think that they don't take it this serious themselves... They simply hate the 'old Germany' and blaming them to be Judeociders it's a score of opportunity for them. I recall there are German pietists that are actually "Holocaust Deniers", but while this may be more than the population-average, the majority will be staunch believers. Manfred Roeder mentions this in his introduction to the "Auschwitz-Luege" booklet. He got reprimanding letters from churchlings after he took on 'atrocity propaganda'. Well, he realized that there was a connection between this and certain cultural developments in Germany. He should have told those other pietists that according to Claude Lanzmann: "Auschwitz is the refutation of Christ". German main-line Protestantism actually bears witness to this. It's a reversal towards the time prior of the Reformation. The Germans are paying indulgences again not to the pope, though, but to the Jews. Seems Martin Luther was right about them, too.

I think the 'change' in Groening was mostly due to social psychology and not for reasons of shear opportunism.

[hermod]

....
When you're a former member of a group labelled as a criminal organization, being useful to the almighty victors by collaborating with them is of course the best way to stay away from the victors' kangaroo courts and gallows.

Oskar Groening did 'come out' as a Holocaust Believer only later in live. At earliest in the late 1970s, more likely is during the 1980s. What triggered this was somebody confronting him with the Christophersen booklet on Auschwitz. That is 30 to 40 years past world war two. And after quite some bombardment via the media with their Auschwitz Narrative. He was never tried before, although it was known that he worked in Auschwitz as an accountant. He'd known that the crematoria were there, since that can be seen from the outside. He could not possibly have seen the gas chambers that were supposedly in the basement. He was essentially there as a tax collector.

I know that Groening was a late false witness manufactured by the Holocaust industry to rebut the first Holocaust revisionists. But you have to keep in mind that all the former SS-men had a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads during the rest of their whole lives, even after the end of the Nuremberg show trials. As former members of an alleged criminal organization, not being sued and imprisoned for life was a fragile privilege, not an inalienable right, for every one of them. An order from Jerusalem or Washington and any former SS-man was without delay before a kangaroo court of the puppet states established by the victors of 1945 in Germany and Austria. Consequently, turning former SS-men into servile Holocaust witnesses was no problem. Keeping silent about the big lie was not always enough to stay out of jail. Some former SS-men had to open their mouths in order to help spread the big lie. Groening was one them if I'm asked. Unless he just needed money and was paid by wealthy Jews for his acting performance in favor of the Zionist lobby.

According to Rees, this is what he said long prior to his coming out:
Once, shortly aer his return to Germany, he was sitting at the dinner table with his father and his parents-in-law and “they made a silly remark about Auschwitz,” implying that he was a “potential or real murderer.” “I exploded!” says Groening. “I banged my fist on the table and said, ‘This word and this connection are never, ever, to be mentioned again in my presence, otherwise I’ll move out!’ I was quite loud, and this was respected and it was never mentioned again.” Thus did the Groening family settle back and begin to make a future for itself in post-war Germany, enjoying the fruits of the German economic miracle.

Sounds like the ridiculous stories made up by former camp inmates to explain why they "saw it all" but didn't die in a gas chamber during WWII.

I guess he was familiar with the accusations already then. But still a 'Holocaust Denier'. It's plausible that he was one of those that 'only heard about this after the war' and hence was wondering already what he was actually doing in Auschwitz. Whenever the concentration camps came up in German media and hence also private conversations among people... It would be in connection with gassing accusations. Repetition und Association are what will make most people believe in a story. It should not surprise that this would also apply to some of the former SS-men deployed at Auschwitz. Once they buy the story, they can get very defensive about their 'new discovery', especially when they are uncertain about this belief.

Rees' story didn't portray Groening as a 'Holocaust denier.' It portrayed him as a bystander or as an indirect perpetrator denying his own involvement.

I think the 'change' in Groening was mostly due to social psychology and not for reasons of shear opportunism.

Your opinion, not mine. I find it more plausible and likely that he was threatened or bribed as a response to the nascent revisionist movement.

[Hektor]

I don't think he was intentionally manufactured. It's more like with cults. People suddenly have 'experiences', which can manifest in 'memories'. This doesn't result in 'intentional lying', but in people really thinking that 'it was the way it happened'. Plenty of examples in psychology about this. Also from history. If people are emotionally charged their mind will play tricks on them. Especially, when this is affirmed. But it isn't the real deal.

For decades former camp staff that hadn't direct accusations against them, were largely left alone. This changed with ex post facto changes of legislation in Germany. Statutes of limitations were changed so people could be put on trial decades later. And 'guilt' was extended as well. You could become and 'accessory to murder' simply for having been working in a concentration camp. "The Holocaust" became a public issue in Germany, driven by leftist ideologues. That of course did lead to enormous pressure on those that had some function prior to 1945. People that are now in their 90s or older. They were past an age to fight off accusations any longer. And hence easy to get them cooperate with accusations. With presumed guilt, they'd have to 'prove their innocence', which is impossible. And which is the reason that 'burden of proof' is on accusers. This has been circumvented with the Holocaust.

Rees doesn't portray Groening as 'former Holocaust Denier'. But there is indication that, while Groening knew about the accusations, that he rejected them. He just didn't want to talk about them. Probably realizing that open rejection of the accusations would place him into jeopardy. And this is indeed what happened, when SS-men rejected the accusations. They became the accused. It's the same like with witchcraft accusation, rejecting witchcraft and magic as phenomena made people suspect to have a 'pact with the devil' themselves. The whole 'Holocaust' thing has that ring to it. Hitler is the incarnation of evil and who defends him or his followers against accusations is immediately associated with it.

Repentant 'Holocaust perpetrators' can count on being 'welcomed back' into the 'ranks of the good'. It is a 'cult of confession'. It got all the marks of totalism all over it.

[hermod]

I don't think he was intentionally manufactured. It's more like with cults. People suddenly have 'experiences', which can manifest in 'memories'. This doesn't result in 'intentional lying', but in people really thinking that 'it was the way it happened'. Plenty of examples in psychology about this. Also from history. If people are emotionally charged their mind will play tricks on them. Especially, when this is affirmed. But it isn't the real deal.

The phenomenon of false memories is of course relevant to Holohoax testimonies, but I still find that Groening sounded more like a man knowingly telling lies for personal gain (money? immunity? both?) as part of an organized antirevisionist counterstrike from the Zionist lobby.

1977, professional Zionist propagandist Elie Wiesel rising up against the nascent revisionist movement :

https://postimg.cc/cKpz6t5f

https://postimg.cc/GT8JDX82

Some information on false memories :

https://postimg.cc/PPS0LGv1

https://postimg.cc/0b0dj2PP

https://postimg.cc/K4LxHbRm

https://postimg.cc/PCH75sXz

https://postimg.cc/7f9rTMB2

[Hektor]

I don't think he was intentionally manufactured. It's more like with cults. People suddenly have 'experiences', which can manifest in 'memories'. This doesn't result in 'intentional lying', but in people really thinking that 'it was the way it happened'. Plenty of examples in psychology about this. Also from history. If people are emotionally charged their mind will play tricks on them. Especially, when this is affirmed. But it isn't the real deal.

The phenomenon of false memories is of course relevant to Holohoax testimonies, but I still find that Groening sounded more like a man knowingly telling lies for personal gain (money? immunity? both?) as part of an organized antirevisionist counterstrike from the Zionist lobby.
...

That's the thing with motives or what goes on within a persons mind. One can not know this with certainty for sure. One can however hypothesis about this and come to a plausible statement on this. But in this case you'd need to know ALL relevant facts to say anything sufficiently meaningful about this. Otherwise one needs to give him the benefit of the doubt on this.

If he did it for money, what is the evidence that he got or was offered money. How much exactly? When was that money offered to him. From what I read it seems he was modestly wealthy and of an age were 'big money' doesn't make much of a difference anymore.

Immunity is also implausible. Since after all he was put on trial, even if the verdict was merely symbolic. Immunity for what exactly. The legality of sentencing people although nothing criminal could ever be proven against them is in itself something that could have challenged. The question is why none of the lawyers brought this up. In my opinion they did do so thinking that although he may not have been criminally guilty, that he is somehow 'morally' guilty. And the Germans have it with the 'moralism'. If an argument is clad in moralistic terms, they find this highly appealing and persuasive most of the time. Especially if this comes with repetition and an appearance of 'moral authority'. Once they accept that, any facts become secondary or even entirely useless to them.

So I'd settle for 'moral pressure' and to a wish of wanting to be seen 'a good person'. And a 'good person' needs of course to confess the tenets of the faith that include 'the gas chambers' and 'a killing program'. If you openly challenge this, when 'all good people believe this', you are considered impious, a heretic, a witch or worse. Now they may not come and burn you at the stake for this (yet). But you can be sure there will be plenty of folks ready to bad-mouth, black-ball and ostracize you. Naturally nobody really wants that. So the vast majority will go along with this. Even if they have doubts about the validity of the 'statement of faith'. Publicly they will try to justify it in some way. With the Germans I noticed lines like "Yeah, perhaps not six million, but even one million would be a horrible crime". or: "OK, maybe the gas chamber in Auschwitz wasn't real, but what about all the other camps"... Sooner or later they will jump to sykewar footage from 1945 or 'perpetrator confessions' during proceedings. Those dudes that 'confessed' at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial had even a docu-program dedicated to them. Doesn't seem they have 'recanted'. Now I believe in their case this was done for shortening the prison terms. But given that they noticed that everybody seemed to believe the 'gas chamber story', it should not be surprising that they were compliant perhaps even thinking that their own memories were wrong and that they have corrected this now by repeating what they were told in media, during trials and during endless interrogation sessions.

Going against an established narrative is never easy. And we've seen it with the COVID-scam how quick people can be convinced to believe a narrative even if it is rather silly. I got to admit that on face value the killervirus escapes from Chinese bioweapon's lab and triggers a global pandemic sounds by far more plausible to me than the Holocaust narrative. Still it was false as well. There is more the methodology that is an issue. With the Holocaust it's the void of empirical evidence. In fact Holocaustians will use apparent absence of evidence (for where did the Jews go then?) as proof for their evidenceless claims they were making. They will dump all the contradiction for this and will have this suffice to their mind. And many have of course political motives in this as well. They don't want certain people to look better or worse in terms of narrated history. And plenty of folks are happy that Hitler, the SS, the 'NAZIS', the Germans are portrayed as the bad guys via the Holocaust narrative. They see no reason to have this change. It affirms their present 'morals', the present establishment and system... So it's more comfortable to believe in this.

[hermod]

That's the thing with motives or what goes on within a persons mind. One can not know this with certainty for sure. One can however hypothesis about this and come to a plausible statement on this. But in this case you'd need to know ALL relevant facts to say anything sufficiently meaningful about this. Otherwise one needs to give him the benefit of the doubt on this.

If he did it for money, what is the evidence that he got or was offered money. How much exactly? When was that money offered to him. From what I read it seems he was modestly wealthy and of an age were 'big money' doesn't make much of a difference anymore.

There are many real things which one can not know with certainty. Millions of people cheat on their partners every day and most of them won't get caught most of time. But their cheating is real nevertheless. Not all bribes and threats leave a paper trail or a public statement behind.

Immunity is also implausible. Since after all he was put on trial, even if the verdict was merely symbolic. Immunity for what exactly.

For being a former member of a group labelled as a criminal organization and for helping to run an alleged extermination camp.

The legality of sentencing people although nothing criminal could ever be proven against them is in itself something that could have challenged. The question is why none of the lawyers brought this up. In my opinion they did do so thinking that although he may not have been criminally guilty, that he is somehow 'morally' guilty. And the Germans have it with the 'moralism'. If an argument is clad in moralistic terms, they find this highly appealing and persuasive most of the time. Especially if this comes with repetition and an appearance of 'moral authority'. Once they accept that, any facts become secondary or even entirely useless to them.

Germany is not an independent state. German lawyers can hardly defend a Nazi without being labelled as "deniers" and treated accordingly. Wasn't Ernst Zündel's lawyer Sylvia Stolz convicted and jailed for such a thing?

So I'd settle for 'moral pressure' and to a wish of wanting to be seen 'a good person'. And a 'good person' needs of course to confess the tenets of the faith that include 'the gas chambers' and 'a killing program'. If you openly challenge this, when 'all good people believe this', you are considered impious, a heretic, a witch or worse. Now they may not come and burn you at the stake for this (yet). But you can be sure there will be plenty of folks ready to bad-mouth, black-ball and ostracize you. Naturally nobody really wants that. So the vast majority will go along with this.

Possible. But possible doesn't mean true. We'll never know. We can only speculate about that.

Even if they have doubts about the validity of the 'statement of faith'. Publicly they will try to justify it in some way. With the Germans I noticed lines like "Yeah, perhaps not six million, but even one million would be a horrible crime". or: "OK, maybe the gas chamber in Auschwitz wasn't real, but what about all the other camps"... Sooner or later they will jump to sykewar footage from 1945 or 'perpetrator confessions' during proceedings.

Not only the Germans. All the normies do that. Everywhere. It's not that they don't know. They don't want to know. And they'll get angry if you don't leave them alone with their faith.

Those dudes that 'confessed' at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial had even a docu-program dedicated to them. Doesn't seem they have 'recanted'. Now I believe in their case this was done for shortening the prison terms. But given that they noticed that everybody seemed to believe the 'gas chamber story', it should not be surprising that they were compliant perhaps even thinking that their own memories were wrong and that they have corrected this now by repeating what they were told in media, during trials and during endless interrogation sessions.

Recanting their former statements would have been labelled as "Holocaust denial." Who would want to go to jail a first time for nonexistent war crimes and then a second time for a thoughtcrime?