The oldest person ever to be convicted of mass murder
In these past few days we have been writing about famous criminal law cases and their statistics, we've made a little research on this subject so the data could be incorporated into the new articles we are publishing in our printed magazine.
So if you ever wondered who was the oldest person ever to be convicted of mass murder, we may have found your answer.
According to our research, the first place would correspond to a German man called Oskar Gröning. Yes, you guessed, it was indeed during the events that occurred in WWII.
Who is Oskar Gröning?
Oskar Gröning (transliterated as Oscar Groening in English); was born on 10 June 1921, he is a German former SS-Unterscharführer who was stationed at Auschwitz concentration camp. His responsibilities included counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners, and he was in charge of the effects prisoners had arrived with. On a few occasions, he witnessed the procedures of mass-killing in the camp, and each time requested transfer. After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning was captured by the British on 10 June 1945 when his unit surrendered. He was eventually transferred to Britain as a prisoner of war and worked as a forced labourer.
Criminal charges and trial
Gröning's prosecution has been reported to be a part of Germany’s final effort to bring the last Nazi war-crimes suspects to justice. State prosecutors managed to charge the defendant on a legal precedent set in 2011 by the conviction of the former Sobibor extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk by a court in Munich.
The trial commenced on 20 April 2015 at Lüneburg Regional Court (Landgericht). In an opening statement, Gröning asked for forgiveness for his mainly clerical role at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, by saying: "For me there's no question that I share moral guilt," the 93-year-old told the judges, acknowledging that he knew about the gassing of Jews and other prisoners. "I ask for forgiveness. I share morally in the guilt but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide".
During the trial several of the 60 'co-claimants' gave evidence. Eva Mozes Kor who was 10 years old when she arrived at Auschwitz, testified that she and her twin sister were used for the cruel medical experiments conducted by Josef Mengele and that she had lost her parents and older sisters in Auschwitz. Kor conversed with and embraced the defendant after giving evidence, while other holocaust survivors in the courtroom protested against this gesture.
Another witness, Max Eisen who was 15 years old at the time of entry into Auschwitz, described the brutality of the extermination part of the camp, including extracting gold teeth from dead victims. On 12 May 2015, Susan Pollack, an 84-year-old Briton, gave evidence how she was taken from Hungary to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; describing the living conditions encountered at Auschwitz, she said: "I was in a barrack with about 800 other girls ... we were losing weight, we weren’t able to use our minds anymore".
On the same day, Ivor Perl, an 83-year-old Briton who was born in Hungary into a religious Jewish family, also gave evidence; Perl testified that he was 12 years old when he arrived at Auschwitz and that he and his brother lost his parents and seven siblings in the Holocaust." In July, Irene Weiss, an 84-year-old survivor from the United States, testified that her family was torn apart on arrival at Auschwitz in May 1944, during the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews and that she had lost both her parents, four siblings and 13 cousins at Auschwitz.
Verdict and sentence
On 15 July 2015, he was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews. Reacting to the sentence, Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor said that she was "disappointed" adding: "They are trying to teach a lesson that if you commit such a crime, you will be punished. But I do not think the court has acted properly in sentencing him to four years in jail. It is too late for that kind of sentence... My preference would have been to sentence him to community service by speaking out against neo-Nazis. I would like the court to prove to me, a survivor, how four years in jail will benefit anybody."
Gröning's defence lawyer, Hans Holtermann, was quoted as saying that he would review the verdict before deciding whether to appeal. Any appeal was required to be lodged within one week.
