The Accountant of Auschwitz (2018) - full transcript

The main camp of
Auschwitz was like a small town,

with its gossiping
and chatting.

There was a canteen.

There was a cinema.

There was a sports club
of which I was a member.

It was all fun
and entertainment,

just like a small town.

The special situation
at Auschwitz

led to friendships,
of which I'm still saying today,

I like to look back on
with joy.

We were convinced
by our world view



that we had been betrayed
by the entire world,

and that there was
a great conspiracy

of the Jews against us.

But surely
when it comes to children,

you must have realized that they couldn't
possibly have done anything to you.

The children, they're not
the enemy at the moment.

The enemy is the blood
inside them.

A former guard
at the notorious

Auschwitz concentration camp
has gone on trial in Germany.

Oskar Groening is charged

with more than 300,000 counts
of accessory to murder.

Groening is now 93 years old.

My children grew up
knowing our family had a secret,

a burden.



They would ask me why they
don't have any grandparents,

aunts, uncles.

If I think about
my Holocaust experience,

those few minutes
on the ramp in Auschwitz

were really the defining
moments in my life.

Try to imagine that
tomorrow someone comes and tells you,

you have to leave your home,

your parents are taken away,

and you don't know
if you ever see them and when.

And eventually it's over
and you live.

And then you find out
you're alone.

You have no parents.

You have no family.

Is it over, ever?

I first heard
about Oskar Groening

when Thomas Walther,
who was a former judge

and an advocate,
a lawyer in Germany,

approached me and told me
that he would like

to talk to me about
my experience in Auschwitz

in connection with a trial

that is being held
for Oskar Groening.

I felt that, "What have I got to
do with this particular person?

I certainly didn't know him."

I did a considerable amount
of thinking.

You know, first of all,
I had to decide

this question as to whether
a 94-year-old man

who did this terrible deed

seventy years before
is still guilty of the crime.

The first time
I've heard of Oskar Groening

was from Thomas.
He tried to convince me to come

to Germany as a witness.

At first, my gut reaction was,
"To Germany? No way.

Why would I go
and put myself through

all the memories
and all the horrible feelings

of being
a 16-year-old slave again?"

But Thomas was persistent.

He said, "It's not only about Oskar
Groening, and you and the past,

it's about establishing
a precedent for the future."

Groening is very
old, but nobody was too old

to be killed in Auschwitz.

If you take part in killing
as a 20-year-old man,

then you can be prosecuted
as a 50-year-old man,

or also as a 90-year-old man.

Look, for a long time,

I feel that I have
a responsibility

as a survivor to make sure

that this terrible event, the
Holocaust, should not be forgotten.

This trial
is a defining moment

in the history
of the Holocaust.

The fact that
so many Nazi perpetrators

went unpunished after the war...
But Thomas told me

it was not just about me
and the past,

it was also about setting
a precedent for the future.

And so I felt that I must
be a witness at the trial.

Luneburg is a tiny
city in the north of Germany.

You got your occasional murder
and you got

your everyday trial business,
but a trial of that size...

Luneburg had never experienced
anything like it

and hardly any German city
ever has.

The trial took place
in Luneburg

because this is where
Groening is living,

and according to German law,
you have to be tried

by the court that is in the
vicinity of where you live.

So they set it up
in a community center

where they could house
enough people,

where they could house all these
plaintiffs and all the lawyers,

and all the media attention,
and also have

enough seats for public because
public was supposed to come

and see and, you know,
follow the proceedings.

They should pay for what
they've done. They all knew.

For the kind of crimes
they committed

and what they did
to the Jews,

that should be punished.

The little ones are hanged
and the big ones are let go.

That's the way it is.

To convict a 93-year-old man
doesn't make sense.

I think he's lived
in fear of being

caught for the past 50 years,

and that he would
eventually be exposed.

He was more or less forced.
He was a follower.

And what were our fathers?

Nobody talks about
that anymore.

They were also followers.

Then one would have to hold
many old judges accountable.

Millions yelled, "Heil!" And
nobody supposedly knew anything.

When I was a child,

nobody talked about the war
in my surrounding.

At school, we didn't hear
a single word about the war.

I had to learn
when I was 16 and 17

in some movies
or in some books

that there was a war
that started in my country.

Some liked to talk
about the war,

but only what they suffered
during the war,

or what heroes
they were during the war.

Nobody talked
about the victims.

And that was really
hard for us to understand

that we had so many criminals
in our country,

millions of them,

and nobody explained to us
what really happened.

Both of my parents
supported the Nazis.

My mother just followed
her husband.

My father was a Nazi
from the very beginning.

He died '53,
he committed suicide.

Uh, he was still stuck
to the old system of Nazi time.

We have old fascists
and new fascists of today.

One organization that helped
in the Groening trial

was the Anti-Fascist
organization.

As the title says,

they fight against fascism.

And it happened 70 years ago
in our country,

and it happens today.

Sieg Heil!

There was some
disturbance from right-wing people.

So, the lawyer,
Thomas Walther,

called six weeks before the
Groening trial started here,

that we can prepare ourselves

and make a system of banners
to keep away

the Holocaust deniers from the
survivors and their relatives.

- Is the text ready?
- Yes, it's ready.

There are people making
the banners as we speak.

I'm an Anti-Fascist.
It's, uh,

what kind of society
I want to live.

And we have a lot of racism
here in Germany

and lots of houses
are burning

because racist
and fascist people

are mobilizing against refugees,
and lots of people get killed.

And if we know
our history, then...

we can't do nothing now.

So we have to act now too.

What may be one of the last big
Holocaust trials opened today in Germany.

Under a new legal theory
that death camp workers

can be held accountable
for the Holocaust,

even if they didn't murder
anyone with their own hands.

The man being charged
admits he was at Auschwitz

but says
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.

The first day,
11 Holocaust deniers came.

They shouted out loud
and even shared

some papers.

"Justice for the survivors
of Auschwitz"

Our friends put up the banner

to show that there will be
justice for the survivors.

It's a very difficult
situation for the survivors

to stand in line
for two hours.

Especially when
they're confronted with

fascists like Mr. Wulff
or Mrs. Haverbeck.

In Auschwitz
there were no gassings.

Auschwitz was not
an extermination camp.

Also, the commander's orders,
the Reich's orders...

We will stop the conversation.

I told you earlier today
you could face charges.

- Yes, but the...
- It does not matter.

You'll be prosecuted
and forced to leave.

I've had enough! I'm going over
there to a public proceeding.

And I said please don't
criminalize us by talking to us.

I want to go to the trial.

The survivors
and their relatives

always had protection

against our right-wing people.

And that was
important for us,

and also very important
for them.

The first day,
it was a frenzy,

it was amazing.

Everyone everywhere in Europe,
all the major cities.

We started being mobbed,

literally,
by various TV cameras

and journalists

who wanted to know opinions

and where we were standing
on this issue.

There's a lot of merits

to have a person,
even 70 years after,

to bring him to court.
Nobody should be able

to get away
with crimes against humanity,

against Jews.

"The survivor of Auschwitz,"

sitting in a German court,

surrounded by German judges
and German attorneys,

and being treated with respect.

And that was in itself

an interesting experience
for me.

At the time,
I was good friends

with Rainer Hoess,
and Rainer Hoess

is a big advocate
against the neo-Nazis.

I'm the grandson
of Rudolf Hoess,

the commandant of the Auschwitz
concentration camp.

He was responsible
for 1.1 to 1.3 million killings

at Auschwitz.

Hate is a powerful weapon,
and it was

in the Second World War,
and it is today.

The Groening trial,
it is important for our growing youth.

In the past, we only had
the voices of the survivors,

of the victims there.

But nobody really listened
to the perpetrators.

Come out.

They won't start without me.

Oskar, what do
you expect from the trial?

A verdict of not guilty,
I don't know.

- Are you innocent?
- What are you thinking?

Mr. Groening,
don't say anything.

We were sitting in
one section of the courtroom

and opposite us

this frail old man
walking with a walker

walked in.

I felt cold
looking at this man.

The whole thing was
a surreal type of experience.

That's the only way
I can describe it.

I did feel sympathy for him.

He looked
like a pitiful old man.

But that all changed
the moment he sat down,

and he looked around,

and he put his arms like that.

You know, 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
at that point.

Good morning.

The trial made big headlines
because Oskar Groening

was one of the few,
if not the first,

Auschwitz accused who said
that he will basically

say something in court.

He told what really happened,
what he experienced

during the time in Auschwitz.

Most of them tell some lies,

what they did during that time,

but Mr. Groening
told the reality.

He told the truth
about his time,

and that was very special.

He basically admitted

that he collected goods,
he collected the luggage

of the people that would be
brought to Auschwitz.

He would skim through
the luggage for valuables.

He was one of the very few
Nazi perpetrators that admitted

in court that people were
plundered of their belongings

and didn't really expect them
to be given back to them.

So in the consequence,
everyone working there knew people

were brought there to die.

I think he's a symbol,

and symbols often get
unfairly targeted.

Had he lived
at a time or at an age

where the real perpetrators
had been effectively punished,

probably nobody would have
gotten to him,

he would have been
so low down on the list.

The real issue
is what did Germany do,

not only during the war,
but what did it do after the war.

And what it did after the war
is disgraceful.

Here. "Do not bend."

Ha! Look what I got here.

This one do not bend,
that's fan mail.

There's a picture in here
and I have to sign it.

Here.

He wants me to sign
the pictures for him.

Ah, this is a rare one.

I stood on the headquarters.

Ah, that's also a rare one.

I landed on the beaches
of Normandy.

I was a member
of General Patton's army.

We pursued the Germans
back across France,

back into Germany.

And by that time,
I was assigned

as a war-crimes investigator.

I believe I was the first
war-crimes investigator

in the United States Army.

The problem I faced

as the chief prosecutor
at Nuremberg

was what do I ask for?

Here were 3000 men

who every day went out
and murdered in cold blood

thousands of people,

including children shot,
one shot at a time.

And I felt that I...

could not possibly do justice

to the million people
who had been killed.

But if I could establish
a rule of law

which could protect
humankind in the future,

that would make this trial
more meaningful

than whatever I would do with
these handful of murderers.

This document,
which I haven't had in my hands

since 1948 maybe,

it's a list of my defendants

in the Einsatzgruppen Trial
at Nuremberg.

And I had prepared
a list showing the names

of the defendants,
the position they occupied. For example,

Ohlendorf, commanding officer
of Einsatzgruppen D,

killed 90,000.

All of them pleaded
not guilty!

Nobody came in and said, I did anything.
Oh, my goodness, no!

They said this was necessary
to carry out Hitler's orders.

And there was a war going on,
what do you want us to do?

I had 22 defendants
selected by me

out of 3000 mass murderers who
murdered over a million people!

And I could prove it!
I had all their top-secret

contemporaneous documents.
No question about the facts.

I wanted top people,
planners,

people who had high command,

responsible positions.
Their specific assignment was

to murder, in cold blood,

every single Jewish man,
woman and child

they could lay
their hands on.

And I knew

that picking 22 defendants
out of 3000 men

is only a poor sampling

for the ridiculous reason that
we only had 22 seats in the dock.

Did we seek to do justice?

Of course not.

Because we'd still be there
trying Nazis to this day.

So you try to make
a statement of principle.

The principle is don't do this,
it's a crime against humanity.

Stop doing it!
If you insist upon doing it,

we'll try to catch you
if you're a leader

and put you away
so you won't do it again,

and others will be deterred
from doing it.

And so,
when the presiding justice,

Michael Musmanno,
opened the trial, he said...

We're now ready to hear the
presentation by the prosecution.

I then went on to say,
"Vengeance is not our goal..."

...nor do we seek merely
a just retribution.

We ask this court

to affirm
by international penal action

man's right to live
in peace and dignity,

regardless of his race
or creed.

The case we present

is a plea of humanity...

"...to law." Because really,

that's what I was trying
to accomplish.

Nuremberg
was a trial that marked

the beginning of international
criminal law as we know it.

Notorious Nazi criminals
tried at Nuremberg

included Hermann Goering...

Rudolf Hess,

many, many others.

But the trials themselves
were not well received

by the German public. They were
perceived to be victor's justice.

Nobody feels like sitting and
thinking about their crimes.

They want to move on.

And some of that
is legitimate.

This is a country that has been
turned into rubble.

And it becomes a question of
rebuilding, brick by brick.

So the last thing people want to do is
sit around and talk about their crimes

and their guilt and how
they devastated Europe.

At the Hall
of Justice in Nuremberg,

history's greatest trial
nears its fateful close.

The outcome was most of
the defendants were convicted.

There were a few acquittals.

Some of the defendants were sentenced
to die, and they were executed.

The new German government,
as it was formed,

lobbied intensively

to bring the trials
to an end, and lobbied

to have people who were
convicted at Nuremberg,

even people who were sentenced
to death at Nuremberg, released.

And most of them were.

After the Second World War,
the German system didn't fail

to prosecute
Nazi war criminals,

it deliberately decided
not to prosecute them

because many of the judges
were Nazi war criminals.

There is evidence
that a very high percentage

of German judges,

particularly
West German judges

between 1945 and 1967
were Nazis.

Uh, I don't say former Nazis,

I say Nazis.
People who sympathized with the Nazis.

The Ministry of
Justice are like 99% former Nazis.

And they are the ones who are

creating and defining
the new legal system.

They were sitting in judgement
of themselves.

And obviously, the result was
terrible, terrible injustice.

So it's a terrible,
terrible record

where almost nobody
is convicted.

And again, there's
no political will for it.

The vast majority of Germans
find these trials

kind of cathartic and perfect

because they show the horrors
of places like Auschwitz,

they nail a few, you know,
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.

And this is where, for me,
these trials are such a disaster.

Every country, just about,

has difficult parts
of its past

that it, uh, struggles to...

to come to grips with.

That's true in the United States
still, I would say,

with respect to slavery
and its aftermath.

It was certainly true
in Germany

with respect to Nazi genocide

and crimes against humanity.

Imagine a population

in which
a significant percentage

of the fathers,
brothers, sons

took part in these crimes.

Later on, in ensuing decades,

grandfathers all over Germany
had done this.

It was very difficult
for the German public

to accept the idea

of large-scale prosecutions,
and I don't think there was

great enthusiasm among
prosecutors either.

I'd say in 1945,

there were probably around
800,000 members of the SS.

And that's what
we're dealing with.

The Germans between 1947

and up to the present investigate
over 100,000 of these people.

Of those, they bring
about 6,200 to trial.

Of that, the convictions

for perpetrating murder
is 124.

124 life sentences
of over 6,000 people tried.

I still have nightmares about that
famous photograph of the German soldier

shooting the mother
and her baby,

and imagining this man lived
a full and complete life,

and died
with his own grandchildren

and great-grandchildren surrounding
him thinking he was a wonderful man.

That's the legacy
of the Holocaust in Germany,

not the few war crime trials.

I think
what's happening now is

that the judges
or the prosecutors

want to make good for

the mistakes
that were made in the past,

like in the 1960s
and 1970s.

And I think coming to terms

with the past can be done
in a different way.

It's difficult
to say what good can be done

by punishing someone for a crime
they committed 70 years ago.

The further question
that I think has to be raised,

because of the time period,
is, if you punish a man

of 93 for something
that he did when he was 23,

are you still punishing
the person who did the crime?

Everything about him

in terms of what makes one
a criminal has changed.

He had grown up in a family

that was very nationalist,

he absorbed the ideology
of the Nazis

as a teenager, a young man,

and joined the Hitler Youth,
then volunteered for the SS.

So we're in a way

punishing someone
for what a different person,

a different personality,

somebody with different
characteristics did.

It is too little too late.

This needed to be done
a long time ago.

But how ridiculous is it
that they're doing it now

when these people
are all in their 90s?

Good afternoon.

I'm in my 98th year.

If I committed an illegal act,
I could expect to go to jail.

If I committed an illegal act where
there was no statute of limitations,

as is the case
with crimes against humanity,

you go to jail.

Age is no defense.

And they have to know
that the criminal

will be pursued
as long as necessary

to try to bring whatever justice is
possible under the circumstances.

How did it happen
that here he was

in his own hometown
for 70 years,

and nobody did
anything about it?

All this is happening
because it's doable now.

40 years ago, 50 years ago,
it was very far from doable.

For many, many years,
the German judicial system

used the wrong legal frame

to try to digest
the crimes of the Holocaust.

They had to prove
that the suspect

had committed a specific crime
against a specific victim

and had done so
motivated by racial hatred.

And as you can imagine,
it's not easy to prove.

If you couldn't prove
that someone had engaged

let's say in some kind
of hands-on act of killing,

then you simply
couldn't convict.

Which is one of the reasons
why many, many, many guards

who we might wish
had been convicted

couldn't have been,
because in a sense,

the Germans failed to create
an adequate legal idiom,

an adequate theory
that would permit

these guards to be convicted.

That changed
pretty dramatically

with Demjanjuk.

Because of
the Demjanjuk case,

all of a sudden,
the prosecution in Germany changed

the rules of the game.

Without the Demjanjuk case,

there wouldn't have been
a Groening case.

John Demjanjuk,
originally Ivan Demjanjuk,

immigrated to the United
States around 1950

claiming to be a refugee.

Interestingly,

on his US visa application,

he listed as his residence
from some time in the 1930s

to 1943

"Sobibor, Poland."

Sobibor is a word that should
send a chill up the spine

of every person
on this planet.

One normally thinks
of there having been

six Nazi death camps,

extermination camps.

That is places that existed
solely to murder people.

Those would be Majdanek,

Sobibor, Chelmno,

Belzec, Treblinka,

and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Unfortunately, the people
processing visa applications

for the United States in 1950
had not heard

of Sobibor, and so the word
meant nothing to them.

And Demjanjuk
received his visa.

He worked in Ford
as a machinist.

He put together, kind of,
a perfectly respectable

mid-western life,
until around the mid '70s.

American prosecutors
became aware

that he had lied
on immigration forms.

And this started an investigation
which really turned into

probably the most convoluted
and lengthiest criminal case

to arise
out of the Holocaust.

When the Americans started

investigating Demjanjuk,
they had discovered

an ID of Demjanjuk's
that the SS had issued,

which indicated
that he had been assigned

to work
at the Sobibor death camp.

But when the Americans
started interviewing,

uh, various
death camp survivors,

they found that a number
of survivors identified

Demjanjuk not as a guard
at Sobibor,

but as a guard at Treblinka.

John Demjanjuk goes
on trial in Jerusalem,

accused of being the Nazi
concentration camp guard

known as Ivan the Terrible.

It's described simply
as "Criminal Case 373,

the State of Israel
versus Ivan Demjanjuk."

Israel's last war-crimes trial

convicted Adolf Eichmann,
the administrator

of Nazi Germany's
Final Solution.

25 years later,

another man leaves the
same cell in Ayalon prison,

to make the 80km trip
to a Jerusalem courtroom,

perhaps to meet the same fate
on the gallows.

Hello everybody.
I'm not 'Ivan the Terrible.'

John Demjanjuk
is on trial for his life.

How are you today?

Good, thank you!
I'm good all the time.

They would have shoved me

straight alive
into a pit full of blood.

You weren't there.
I was there!

Ask him! Ask him!
Let him tell you!

Let him tell you
what he would have done to me.

Stand up, John.

Look at me.

Put that away!

I wasn't there.

Mr. Rosenberg...

Please... sit down.

The public is requested
to keep to its seat.

John Demjanjuk continued
to try to convince the court

he is not "Ivan the Terrible,"
the SS officer who helped kill

850,000 Polish Jews.

I am innocent,

innocent, innocent!

We sentence him

for the aforementioned crimes,
the punishment of death

as stipulated in section one
of the Nazi

and Nazi collaborators law.

I'm not the Ivan the Terrible!
I'm a good man!

After he was sentenced
to death,

there was a rather long

and drawn out appellate phase
that happened to coincide

with the unraveling
of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Gorbachev,

tear down this wall!

As the old
Soviet Union fell apart,

their archives opened up.

They discovered, that in fact,

the Israelis
had the wrong guy,

that Demjanjuk had not been

"Ivan the Terrible
of Treblinka."

In fact,
"Ivan the Terrible" had been

this entirely different
Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.

It really showed you

the limits of structuring
these trials

around the eyewitness testimony
of survivors,

because these survivors,
they were positive

that Demjanjuk
was their former tormentor,

and they were wrong.

I miss my wife.

I miss my family.

I miss my grandchildren.

I want to go home.

As a result of this
case of mistaken identity,

he was acquitted.
But the mistaken identity

also indicated that he wasn't
entirely free of guilt.

In my country,
Demjanjuk worked

on an assembly line
for the Ford Motor Company.

And I suspect
if you had asked Demjanjuk

at that time,
"What do you do for a living?"

He would have said,

"I build cars."
Even though, I assume,

he did one little operation,

tightened one bolt or something.
He did not ever build

an entire car himself.

But that's what he did for a living.
They were building cars.

At places like Auschwitz,

Sobibor,

what the SS personnel there
did for a living

was kill innocent
human beings.

There was nothing else
going on there.

Today, a federal court
in Cleveland

stripped John Demjanjuk
of his US citizenship,

finding that he served the
Nazis during World War II

as an armed guard
at the Sobibor death camp.

Our efforts were inspired by
the courage of the survivors,

who, in recounting for us

their nightmarish experiences
of more than half a century ago,

were willing
to reopen psychic wounds

that of course
have never fully healed.

What very few people know
is that after ten years

of litigation against Demjanjuk
in the United States,

when we had gotten courts
to revoke his citizenship

and order him deported,

we went
to the German government

and asked Germany
to accept him,

and Germany said "No."

As Germany and other
governments of Europe

have routinely done
in our cases.

Uh, enormously frustrating.

I then met Thomas Walther

and Kirsten Goetze,

and we brainstormed
how there might be a way

to get Demjanjuk indicted
in Germany.

There was
a very important connection

to the US Office
of Special Investigations

with Eli Rosenbaum
in Washington.

He always told me that

he cannot understand
why we in Germany

do not prosecute these guards

who are watching
that nobody can escape

from a killing place.

Those camps existed to
carry out crimes against humanity,

crimes of persecution.

I gave him the example.
I said,

"Thomas, look, we're sitting
here in my office.

If you decide to chase me
around my office

with a knife to kill me,

and you have a cohort
who is outside the office

holding the door closed,
so that I cannot escape,

under those circumstances,
both you and your cohort

will be found guilty
in my country

of first-degree murder."
And I said,

"I cannot imagine that the law
is any different in Germany."

These camps had no
other reason than to kill people.

There is no question
that this person

is responsible and part
of the whole killing process.

The guards in death camps

like Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Sobibor,

they knew what was going
on there, and they made sure

that the victims
did not escape.

Ultimately, Thomas and Kirsten
did the legal research

and ascertained
that there was case law,

and brought the Demjanjuk case.

This is a very
wonderful day for justice today.

The fact that this person,
who was an active participant

in the mass murder
of 29,000 Jews

in the Sobibor death camp,
is finally going

to stand trial for those
crimes is extremely important.

We are extremely,
extremely pleased, and I think

that the American
and German authorities

deserve a tremendous amount
of credit

for their perseverance
in this case.

Um, target. I'm on
the wrong side of the car.

- He's walking.
- Yeah.

It looks rather innocent,

an elderly man walking
and talking,

but that man
is John Demjanjuk,

the alleged Nazi
death camp guard,

who claims he's too ill
and too frail

to be deported to Europe
to go on trial.

Federal prosecutors
submitted these videos

to the US Circuit
Court of Appeals.

They were taken a few days
before he was detained.

One of the things the
Demjanjuk tried to do in Munich,

is he tried to basically

create the impression
of being incompetent.

He actually engaged

in a rather dramatic
theatrical performance

in which he tried
to convince everyone

that he was kind of
on death's door.

Oh!

Oy, oy, oy, oy,
oy, oy, oy!

First of all, the problem
is that Demjanjuk himself,

I think, put on a great act
today, and he's gonna

do everything possible
to try and create

an impression that he's simply
incapable of standing trial.

If you've seen the
footage of the Demjanjuk trial,

he looked like
a total zombie,

like he didn't have a clue
what was going on.

And what most people don't
know is that the minute

the trial sessions ended every
day, he was up and around,

walking around,
joking around with the people.

It has been a common ruse
in Nazi cases

for decades to claim
either a medical incapacity

or a mental health incapacity

to continue with the trial.

Some courts have fallen
for those ruses,

others have not.

But it is a very,
very common ploy.

I always say that
if there was an Oscar given

for the best performance
by a Nazi war criminal,

Demjanjuk would have
gotten it for 2010.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh!

We now know that
in fact he was

rather healthy at the time,
and he did

successfully survive
his trial.

In a verdict
decades in the making,

a German court has found
91-year-old John Demjanjuk

guilty of accessory to murder

in the case
of more than 28,000 Jews

in Nazi-occupied Poland.

John Demjanjuk
is just a scapegoat

for the Germans.

He has to pay for all the
mistakes they made in the past,

and that's not justice.

What was very important
about the trial in Germany

was in a way
it was the exact opposite

of the Ivan the Terrible trial.

Ivan the Terrible
trial focused

on the particular pathologies

of a very brutal guard.

The trial in Munich

was really the first trial
to come along and say,

"We don't really care
if you were cruel or not.

Your job description
was basically facilitating

an act of extermination,
and that's why we're going

to hold you guilty
in a court of law."

You were an accessory to murder
because, by definition,

that was
your job description.

The following year,
Demjanjuk died in Germany

while his case was on appeal.

But the precedent
of court agreeing

that someone who served
as a guard

at a death camp
shared complicity

in the killings
that took part there

inspired, shall we say,
German prosecutors

to prosecute other guards.

Prosecutors in
Germany are reopening hundreds

of investigations
into former Nazis.

So why has it taken so long
to bring these people to trial?

This is the uniqueness
and significance

of the Demjanjuk conviction.

Basically what the court in Munich
said in May was, if you served

as an armed SS guard
at a pure death camp,

you're automatically guilty
of accessory to murder.

This gave the German
prosecution a new lease on life.

Now the question then was,
how many of these people are alive?

After the Demjanjuk verdict,

the central office
here started

to look again

at all the six death camps.

We put together
all these puzzle pieces

in order to get an image

who was involved in a crime.

Yeah. There it is,
right here.

Germany is making
up for it with what it's got.

There's slim pickings these
days for Nazi war criminals.

Many of them are dead.
And many of the survivors are dead.

It's not as if the German
government has its choice

of a wide variety
of players to go after.

Now I got a tip
from Simon Wiesenthal

in the early 1980s.

Mr. Wiesenthal told me that there
was a Nazi named Haralds Puntulis,

who was living in Canada,

but his whereabouts
were unknown.

And Puntulis took part
in the massacre

of more than 5,000
Jews and Roma

in a village in Latvia.
He wasn't hard to find.

I found him,

gardening in Willowdale,

which ironically enough,

has a great many Jewish people
who live there.

But, just before
the authorities could act,

and before my article
exposing him came out,

Puntulis died.

There is this real rush then
to find people, anyone.

But as you can imagine,
they're all extraordinarily old.

There are very few of them who
are still fit to stand trial.

So there is this feeling
that now,

before it's too late,
we need to do everything we can

to bring every last
Nazi to trial.

As the long list of people

that they believed were Nazi
war criminals became smaller,

an accountant from Auschwitz
was singled out.

He was put under the spotlight
because of an interview

that he did for the BBC,
where he openly admitted

and described in detail

the crimes that were being
committed in Auschwitz.

You were part of the
largest killing factory in history.

You were working there.

You personally contributed

to the killing of around
one million people.

Don't you think you should
have stood trial?

No, I don't think so.

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.

He was an accomplice.
He knew what he was doing.

But what he didn't know was
that the interview with the BBC

would ultimately spark
the investigation,

because at that time,
before Demjanjuk,

guards were not seen
as being complicit.

And for decades,
he lived peacefully

in a small town
outside of Luneburg.

They got Groening.
They went after him.

No.

Carla has prepared my lunch.

So we'll let her prepare it
when she's ready to serve it.

- Okay. You gonna eat?
- Hi, Benji.

- Good morning!
- Hi, Benji.

There are many trials being carried on
now, which are remarkable.

Old people who have managed to
evade justice for many years.

It doesn't make
a very big difference

whether they spend
some time in jail or not.

On the principle,
it does make a difference.

They should know that they're
not going to get away with it.

We'll pursue them wherever
they are as long as necessary

and try to have them
explain their actions.

If you know that he was
a guard in a camp

which killed your father,
your mother, your grandfather,

don't you have to have
some consideration

for the victims,
rather than the perpetrator?

Our argument about the case

was that the things that
Mr. Groening did in Auschwitz

actually were not
some kind of support

of killing the people
who had been

transported to Auschwitz
at that time.

Of course he supported
the system,

but not the killing itself.

Many SS members
here in Germany,

in former trials,
they often said,

"Well, I didn't kill them!

They were killed by a...
by a machine."

His position as a subordinate
was quite clear.

He was not
a high ranking officer.

He was not in a sort
of position to give orders.

This is the question.
Who is responsible?

Groening was a cog
in the wheel,

but the wheel couldn't
have turned without that cog.

Individual killing
is not a requisite.

There is no evidence that
Hitler personally killed anybody

at Auschwitz, or any Jew.

Everybody who was aware

of what was going on
at Auschwitz

is both morally
and legally guilty.

The chef,
less than the person

who poured the gas
into the chambers.

The accountant,
less than the guard.

But he made
choices throughout

and he is responsible
for his choices.

Groening was not just
an accountant.

He's known as the
"Bookkeeper of Auschwitz"

and the "Bookkeeper
of Auschwitz" creates,

I think, a somewhat
misleading image.

It suggests that he could
have been just squirrelled away

in some little shack
adding up numbers.

He came to Auschwitz
specifically as a bookkeeper.

But it took much more
than bookkeeping.

He also had to look
after the system.

And he was seen
on the ramp.

This is the ramp where
it's kind of in the collective

or popular imagination from
films like Schindler's List.

This is when the SS
are sorting people out,

saying these people are being
exterminated immediately,

and this small group
is actually entering

the prison population
of the camp.

If you look at something
like Auschwitz,

why weren't more
of the guards prosecuted?

Well, Auschwitz
was a hybrid camp.

It was part
slave labor camp,

and it was part death camp.

If these guards
were just associated

with the slave labor aspect,

then you wouldn't
necessarily know

that they actually were
involved with the killing.

And if you didn't know they
were involved with the killing,

you couldn't prosecute them
for anything under German law.

In the case of Groening,

we know that Groening was
at Auschwitz for a long time.

He was there for two years.

But if you look
at the indictment,

the indictment focuses only
on a three-month period.

During this
three-month period,

that's when the trains
were arriving

with these hundreds of
thousands of Jews from Hungary.

In this case,

the Hungarian Action
is the crime.

From the 16th of May

until the 11th of July,

there has been killed
300,000 Jews.

If we can prove
that Groening has been

on one day in this time
on the ramp,

then he is guilty
of the whole crime.

The witnesses arrived
on a certain day

at a certain hour during this
"Hungarian Action."

Important is that
the witnesses talk about

what happened
with their families,

that they speak
about their sadness,

they speak about the loss.

Tomorrow, Bill,
you have to testify.

Speak slowly, but fluently.

And don't think about
the faces of the judges.

This is a special thing
as far as I'm concerned.

It's a very important,
emotional thing.

The criminal department
of justice

has made a lot of faults,

very heavy faults.

And I invite
the German justice system

to come back
in a better way.

The time came for us
to testify at the trial.

I sat down in front
of the presiding judge.

Thomas Walther
sat next to me,

and then the judge asked me
to describe what happened

when I arrived
to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Then train stopped.

After a while, all of a sudden,
the doors were opened.

"Everybody out!
Get out of the boxcar!

Leave your parcels in there!
You'll get them later."

It was a space

filled with people
running around,

some in striped pajamas

and a lot of soldiers
with rifles.

Dogs on leash that were
straining against the leash

and barking at us.

The people pouring out
from the wagons,

thousands of people,

babies crying,
mothers holding them.

They started screaming,
"Men and boys into one column.

Five in a row, fast! Fast!"

I grabbed a hold
of my dad's hand

and stood there, and my mom,
my sister and aunts,

my grandma were in the
other column with the women.

They were screaming
and yelling.

People were so traumatized,
so scared.

So there is that Nazi
yelling in German, "Twins! Twins!"

My poor mother hesitated
and said, "Is that good?"

And the Nazi nodded "yes."

So my mother said, "Yes."

At that moment
another Nazi came,

pulled my mother to the right,
we were pulled to the left.

We were crying,
she was crying.

I didn't really understand

that this would be the last
time that we would see her.

My mother, with my siblings,
my grandparents and my aunt,

they were told to go
to the left.

I know they were taken into the
gas chamber of Krematoria II.

My father and uncle and I,
we were selected for slave labor.

We were processed.
Our clothes were taken away,

our hair was shaved.
And the next morning,

we were given a tattooed
number and striped outfits.

And I became a slave labor
working for a German Reich.

Mengele used
1,500 sets of twins

in his various experiments.

Take a set of twins,

inject one with a disease.

When that one dies,
you kill the 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
he said, "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.

While I was looking around,

trying to make sense
of what I'm looking at,

I realized all of a sudden
that I was alone

and my mother was
several rows ahead of me,

and I started rushing
through the crowds

to catch up to her.

And 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!"

I said, "No, no, my mother is
there, I want to go with her!"

And he just kept
the rifle there

and said,
"No! You go there!"

And then I cried out
after my mom,

and she turned.

And I don't know
what I expected,

but she just looked at me
and didn't say a word.

And then turned around
and kept on going.

And I never saw her again.

That was, I think,
the hardest thing

that ever happened to me.

Even now I have trouble
talking about it.

And for over half a century,
I couldn't.

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.

Oh, 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."

Oh, my God.

All of these Glieds
are relatives...

uncles and aunts of mine.

He spoke about
this whole situation as

"there was this bug
on the ground,

and I stepped on it."

To see the faces
of the survivors

after Groening spoke...

it was a terrible situation

when he explained some
stories out of his work.

Like the crying suitcase.

And he said,
"The crying stopped."

And that was...
I think that was,

it almost killed me.
I just couldn't believe it.

He said,
"That wasn't nice."

And later on they asked him,
"What would you have done?"

"Well, maybe shoot him.

That would have been
the nice thing for him."

I accept the fact
that they were brainwashed,

but there comes a point

where no matter how much
you are 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."

I can't accept that.

I mean, he was giving
this information... willingly.

I mean, he was asked,

"Did a Jew have a chance
to leave this place alive?"

He says, "Absolutely not."

And that affected me
a lot, so...

He was an adult.

He was responsible
for his actions.

Not everybody who joined
the Hitler Youth

ended up joining the SS.
Not everybody who joined the SS

ended up being a guard
at Auschwitz,

leading people
to their death.

As far as following orders,
what one often hears is,

"I had to take part
in these crimes,

because had I not done so,

uh, the Germans
would have executed me

or sent me to a death camp."

One of the most
remarkable statistics

to emerge
out of the Holocaust

is the number of SS officers,

or even
senior German officers,

who suffered serious
life-threatening consequences

as a result of opting out.

That number is exactly zero.

Not one instance
has ever been found

in which it was confirmed

that someone who disobeyed
criminal orders

was subject
to severe punishment,

much less execution.

He was following
orders, but he had to know

at some level of consciousness
that it can't be legal

to murder infants,
babies, the elderly,

to murder people
who are his age now.

He had to know that
that was not only wrong,

but in some
ultimate sense, illegal.

You know, listening to
Groening, I got very upset,

because the things that he
brought forward voluntarily...

I mean, he was a big talker.

All I would want him
to say is, "I'm sorry."

That alone I think
would have been,

at the age of 94,
it would have meant everything,

as far as I was concerned.

Just those two words.

Somebody will have
to make the judgment,

and I think they are going
to consider our testimonies

and we'll see what happens.

I did not know how the
interaction with him 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, clear and loud,

that I forgave him,
as I forgave all the Nazis,

and I forgave everybody
who hurt me.

It's outrageous what she did,
it's absolutely outrageous.

I felt like the floor
opened up

and I fell right down
into a basement.

She kept on
repeating the fact

that these people
are friends of hers.

And I said, "My God.
This woman must be crazy or what?"

Forgiving those
who tortured her

and killed so many,
so cruelly...

She's able to forgive.

Maybe she needs
that forgiveness

in order to go on, to be...

To stay mentally normal.

And what was even more shocking,
the people in the audience,

wherever they were,
they were clapping

this forgiveness thing,

and the judge said,
"Not in my court."

Eva Mozes, you know her story.
You know she was a twin,

and she is...

in every sense of the word,
she is a victim,

as all the other victims,

and she should be
treated like this.

Saturday,
I was coming back to the United States.

The court session was over.

And he was still
sitting at his desk.

So, I went up
to Oskar Groening.

An embrace between
two people is touching people

around the world.

We begin tonight
with an amazing story.

A Terre Haute woman
is at the center

of international attention.

This after a courageous
act of kindness

that took social media
by storm.

She was the most
famous person in Luneburg

because the world's press
were all around her.

Everybody caught onto this
forgiveness business, you see.

The biggest gesture
you could imagine.

You hug the monster,

you hug part of the machine
that killed your family,

that almost killed you,

so it was a gesture
of forgiving,

but there was big media
headlines and big outcry

if she should do that,
if that is too much,

if one can forgive
part of the Nazi machine

or if it just
should not be forgiven.

She has succeeded
in infuriating

practically every other
survivor around,

and for good reason.

By forgiving,

I removed whatever
happened to me.

She asked me many times
in the past,

"You have to forgive
your grandfather."

And I said no,
I can't forgive him.

Not with all that stuff
he put on our shoulders.

But she has to deal with it.

She has to stand it.

So it's up to her.

If that's the way for Eva
to live with it, I accept it.

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.

Groening,
right after the war,

decided to marry
the widow of his brother.

He had two children,

and of course he lived
a peaceful life

and he enjoyed life.

A very important
thing for Mr. Groening

was in the middle of the '80s.

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 found it insufferable
that this guy

was going around saying
the Holocaust didn't happen.

He was in Auschwitz.
He could tell you that it happened.

He wanted to actually
come along and tell people,

"Look, I was there,
I know that these crimes were committed."

He made some interviews
to the German news magazine Spiegel

and to the BBC.

Before these interviews,
nobody knew Mr. Groening.

He exposed himself.

And that was
a positive thing to do,

clearly, a courageous
thing to do.

So, I think that's a very
important extenuating circumstance.

And to me,

that would have been sufficient
reason to not prosecute him.

Mr. Groening, what do you say
to those who still deny the Holocaust?

Nothing.
They are hopelessly lost.

Mr. Groening
made a long statement

about the things
he did in Auschwitz,

and he confessed
that in a moral way,

he is guilty in the Holocaust.
In the end, um,

the decision whether
he is guilty or not

has to be taken
by the court,

and that cannot be made
by Mr. Groening.

Groening is testifying.
He is not acting sick.

He is the same age
as Demjanjuk

but he is not wearing a
baseball cap or lying in bed.

Oh,
I think the testimony of Oskar Groening

is very, very important.

He is a hands-on
participant observer

who puts the lie to all
the Holocaust deniers who say,

"There were no gas chambers,

there were no crematoria,
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.

The truth of the matter is,
you know, in 1945,

at the end of the war and
the discovery of the camps

and the horror
of the Nazis' crimes,

the phrase "never again"
was coined.

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.

It's too dangerous today.
The world is different, it's changing.

Our capacity to kill is
getting completely out of hand.

We see the wars that are
taking place now in Syria.

We talk about ISIS.
It's nothing new.

Part of the reason
you had cases like Rwanda,

and Cambodia, and Biafra,
and Darfur, and Bosnia,

and all these things,
is that it's not at all clear

that if you participate
in such crimes,

you'll actually pay for them.
Again and again and again and again,

people got away with it.

And that's terrible.
That's absolutely terrible.

Without history,
there is no memory.

Without memory,
there is no future.

If we don't learn
from the past,

we repeat
the same mistakes again.

Jews will not replace us!

Jews will not replace us!

If we can send
a powerful 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.

I wanted Groening desperately

to be convicted
of this terrible act,

but I have come
to the conclusion

that I don't want
to see him go to jail.

I feel that
the important thing

is that
he should be convicted,

and he should go back
to this town,

where he lived for 70 years,

where everybody knew
what he did,

and where he was.

And people should see him
walk on the street and say,

"There goes Oskar Groening,

the man who got convicted in
the murder of 300,000 people."

Well, he is all we have.

And if we want
to establish a precedent,

a new law that in the future

will not allow guilty

to escape on technicalities,
we do it through him.

An extraordinary moment
in Germany

when the sins of World War II
finally caught up

with a 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.

Of course the
verdict is not very surprising.

But we will re-examine
the details of the case.

It was emotional.

Thank you.

The fact that
he only got four years,

I think with the same effort,

the judge could have
given him 100 years.

I don't expect that he is
ever going to be in a jail.

This is for
future generations,

for all those people

who are still
murdering people

because they are
different color,

different tribe,
different religion.

It is for them to know
that judgment,

no matter
how long it will take,

will catch up with them.

My being a witness
was like putting a bouquet

on the non-existent grave
of my parents.

I feel that my loved ones
who were murdered

finally got some justice.

That my murdered
mother and father

now, perhaps,

can rest in peace.

I feel tremendous elation

in the fact that I am sitting
in a German court,

with my daughter,

with my granddaughter,

which proves that we,

like the eternal phoenix,

rise again from
the Holocaust ashes,

that we can survive.