The Nazi's testimony
Oskar Gröning was at his local philately club when a fellow stamp collector cast doubts on the Holocaust. Gröning knew he was wrong - because 50 years earlier he had served at Auschwitz. Laurence Rees on what happened when the ex-SS soldier decided to finally confront his past
Monday January 10, 2005
The Guardian
After the war, Oskar Gröning took up a hobby. He worked as a manager in a glass factory near Hamburg, but in his own time he became a keen stamp collector. It was at a meeting of his local philately club, in the late 1980s, that Gröning found himself chatting to a man about politics.
"Isn't it terrible," said the man, "that the government says it's illegal to say anything against the killing of millions of Jews in Auschwitz?" He went on to explain to Gröning how it was "inconceivable" for so many bodies to have been burned.
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. "I was standing at the ramp," he says, "and my task was to be part of the group supervising the luggage from an incoming transport." He watched while SS doctors first separated men from women and children, and then selected who was fit to work and who would be gassed immediately. "Sick people were lifted on to lorries. Red Cross lorries - they [the SS] always tried to create the impression that people had nothing to fear." Gröning estimates that 80-90% of those on the first transport he witnessed were selected to be murdered at once.
Later, he witnessed the burning of bodies: "This comrade said, 'Come with me, I'll show you.' I was so shocked that I stood at a distance. The fire was flickering up and the kapo [a prisoner in charge of work details] there told me afterwards details of the burning. And it was terribly
ing - horrendous. He made fun of the fact that when the bodies started burning they obviously developed gases from the lungs and these bodies seemed to jump up, and the sex parts of the men suddenly became erect in a way that he found laughable."
Gröning was upset by the sights he had seen and went to his boss, an SS lieutenant, and put in a request for a transfer to a front-line unit. "He listened to me and said: 'My dear Gröning, what do you want to do against it? We're all in the same boat. We've given an obligation to accept this - not to even think about it.'"
With the words of his superior ringing in his ears, and his transfer request turned down, Gröning returned to work. He had sworn an oath of loyalty; he believed the Jews were Germany's enemy; and he knew that he could manipulate his life at the camp to avoid encountering the worst of the horror. So he stayed.
Gröning then discovered there were "positive" aspects of working at Auschwitz: "I have to say that many who worked there weren't dull, they were intelligent." When he eventually left the camp, he went with some regrets. "I'd left a circle of friends who I'd got familiar with, I'd got fond of, and that was very difficult. Apart from the fact that there are pigs who fulfil their personal drives - there are such people - the special situation at Auschwitz led to friendships which, I still say today, I think back on with joy."
To meet Gröning today, and listen to his attempt to explain his time at Auschwitz, is a strange experience. In appearance, he is indistinguishable from countless other elderly, prosperous Germans. He wears good clothes, eats solid German food and espouses conventional right-of-centre political views. Now in his 80s, he talks almost as if there was another Oskar Gröning who worked at Auschwitz 60 years ago - he can be surprisingly critical of his younger self. The essential, almost frightening, point about him is that he is one of the least exceptional human beings you are ever likely to meet. He is no insane SS monster, but a former bank clerk who happened, because of his own choices and historical circumstance, to find himself working in one of the most infamous places in history.
Gröning joined the Hitler Youth when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He took part in the burning of books written by Jews and "degenerates". He believed he was helping rid Germany of alien cultures. At 17, he began a traineeship as a bank clerk. Just months later war was declared. Gröning wanted to join an "elite" unit of the German army so went to a hotel where the Waffen SS was recruiting and joined up.
After a couple of years of clerical work for the SS, he was posted to Auschwitz. On arrival, Gröning was quizzed by senior officers about his background before the war. "We had to say what we'd been doing, what kind of job, what level of education," he recalls. "I said that I was a bank clerk and that I wanted to work in administration and one of the officers said, 'Oh, I can use someone like that.'"
As Gröning began his task of counting the prisoners' money, he was told that valuables taken from Jews would not be returned. When he asked why, his colleagues replied: "Well, don't you know? That's the way it is here. Jewish transports arrive, and as far as they're not able to work, they're got rid of." Until that moment, Gröning had thought Auschwitz functioned as a "normal" concentration camp.
"It was a shock that you cannot take in at the first moment," he says. But once he had been at Auschwitz for several months, the work, he says, had become "routine". "The propaganda had for us such an effect that you assumed that to exterminate them was basically something that happened in war. And, to that extent, a feeling of sympathy or empathy didn't come up."
Gröning's job was to sort the various currencies taken from the new arrivals and send it to Berlin. In his office, he was insulated from the brutality. The only reminder that different nationalities were coming to the camp was the variety of currencies that crossed Gröning's desk - and the array of alcohol taken from the new arrivals. "When there was a lot of ouzo," he says, "it could only come from Greece - otherwise there was no reason for us to distinguish where they came from. We drank a lot of vodka. We didn't get drunk every day - but it did happen. We'd go to bed drunk, and if someone was too lazy to turn off the light they'd shoot at it - nobody said anything."
In 1944, Gröning's application for a transfer to the front line was finally granted and he joined an SS unit in the Ardennes. He was wounded in fighting before he and his comrades eventually gave themselves up to the British in June 1945. They were handed a questionnaire and Gröning realised that "involvement in the concentration camp of Auschwitz would have a negative response", so he put down that he had worked for the SS economic and administration office in Berlin.
"The victor's always right, and we knew that the things that happened there [in Auschwitz] did not always comply with human rights," he observes, seemingly oblivious to how such understatement might seem grotesque.
Along with his SS comrades, Gröning was imprisoned in a former Nazi concentration camp: "It was not very pleasant - that was revenge against the guilty." But life improved when he was shipped to England in 1946 where, as a forced labourer, he had "a very comfortable life". He went back to Germany in 1948.
Shortly after his return, he was sitting at the dinner table with his parents-in-law and "they made a silly remark about Auschwitz", implying that he was a "potential or real murderer". "I exploded!" says Gröning. "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 Gröning family settle down to its postwar future, enjoying the fruits of the German "economic miracle". Gröning rose through the management at the glass factory, becoming head of personnel. Before retirement, he was appointed an honorary judge of industrial tribunal cases. Even today, he believes that the experience he gained in the SS and Hitler Youth helped his career. "From the age of 12 onwards I learnt about discipline," he says.
When his past was eventually uncovered (he never made any attempt to change his name or hide), the German prosecutors did not press charges against him. This was, in fact, typical. Gröning's experience illustrates how it is possible to have been a member of the SS, worked at Auschwitz, witnessed the extermination process, contributed to the Final Solution, and still not be thought "guilty" by the postwar West German state. Of the 6,500 members of the SS who worked at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and are thought to have survived the war, only about 750 were prosecuted, the vast majority by the Poles.
Throughout his life, Gröning believes he did what he thought was right; it's just that what was "right" then, he says, turns out not to be "right" today. It was not until his philatelic encounter with the Holocaust deniers that he decided to speak openly about his time at the death camp. Once he had retired and knew he would not be prosecuted by the German authorities, he decided he had nothing to lose by confronting his past. Decades after his time at Auschwitz, Gröning finally broke rank.
"I would like you to believe me," he says. "I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematorium. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections took place. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened, because I was there." · The first programme in the series Auschwitz: the Nazis and the Final Solution, written and produced by Laurence Rees, will be shown on BBC 2 tomorrow at 9pm. The accompanying book, also by Rees, is published by BBC Books at £20. To order a copy for £18.40 with free UK p&p, call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875, or go to www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop
