Personally I think its all a bit of a farce and perhaps a bit insulting to the countless victims of numerous atrocities who's perpetrators are not even perused.
I think its also a bit sad the reason Groening was brought to public attention is because he made his role at Auschwitz publically known in order to dismiss ridiculous claims by the far right that the holocaust never even happened.
The pursuit of those who actively took part in the holocaust has always been a just cause. From the naming of war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, and later the work of Simon Wiesenthal and Mossad. But, if this particular SS office worker or accountant is to be held responsible, then every one of the many many thousands involved with the holocaust from admin in Berlin, the German Police, transport, every member of the Allgemeine SS, SA, etc etc should have been held responsible and dealt with in the relevant decades after the war. In law today it is a serious offence not to report a murder. From that should we hold a large portion of the wartime German population to account ?
We have never sought justice or revenge for the millions of slave labourers working in German factories and farms during the war. factories like BWM, AEG, Opel, etc all surviving production demands and bombing raids through their forced labour workforce which also faced atrocities on a daily basis, numerous thousands dying in the process. But, we have never sought members of the R.A.D , all the wartime admin, politicians or any of the factories that profited and survived the war to grow from strength to strength.
If an accountant at Auschwitz is worthy of trial, why not every single member of Waffen-SS division Dirlewanger and every other major SS related atrocity. And if for WW2 genocide it is right to imprison an accountant, should we start to finally look into the millions of victims of countless atrocities committed by the U.S.S.R by the likes of the N.K.V.D. such as the 1941 Katyn forest massacre. The Japanese in China, numerous genocides in Africa and rest of the World since the war, the list is never ending.
This is a case of an old man trying to do the right thing in dismissing the holocaust deniers, and maybe in a small way try to atone for his part in it. A show trial for modern Germany to distance itself from its regrettable past.
