Court: 96-Year-Old ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’ Must Go to Jail

A German constitutional court has ruled that a 96-year-old man—known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” for his role counting the cash stolen from the Nazi concentration camp’s victims—must go to jail for his role in the mass murders committed at the death camp during World War 2. The court refused to overturn a lower court ruling, meaning that Oskar Groening, who was found guilty of being an accessory to murder in at least 300,000 cases, will serve at least some of the four years of jail time to which he was sentenced. Groening’s lawyers had argued that imprisonment at his age would violate his right to life, but the judges ruled that the sheer volume of murders he was found guilty of involvement in meant that there was “a particular importance to carrying out the sentence the state has demanded.”