Gröning, Oskar

Oskar Gröning (10 June 1921 – 9 March 2018), SS Unterscharführer, was deployed from late September 1942 in the department that stored and administered inmate valuables at the Auschwitz Camp. Although several criminal investigations were initiated after the war, all were eventually shelved.

He volunteered to give an interview for the 2005 BBC atrocity-propaganda movie Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. During that interview, he stated that he wanted to speak out also in order to oppose the Holocaust deniers, and then he exclaimed (see the German Wikipedia entry on Gröning):

Weil ich den Leugnern sagen will: Ich habe die Krematorien gesehen, ich habe die offenen Feuerstellen gesehen. […] Ich war dabei.

Because I want to tell the deniers: I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the open fireplaces. […] I was there.

That wasn’t good enough for the BBC, though, who falsified that sentence and added gas chambers into the mix by translating as follows (underscore added; see the PBS transcript):

Because I want to tell those deniers: I have seen the gas chambers, I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the burning pits. […] I was there.

Gröning was a minor bureaucrat in an office at the Auschwitz Main Camp handling inmate valuables. He would not have been allowed to walk into any of the crematoria or to the so-called bunkers in order to see the gas chambers or watch a gassing, so the BBC once again made a fool of themselves with this forgery. Furthermore, Gröning was evidently entirely oblivious of what the deniers claim. He was fighting a straw denier. As can be seen from the entries on crematoria and open-air incinerations, no one denies the existence of crematoria and open fireplaces at Auschwitz. In fact, the latter were probably blazing at their highest intensity when Gröning arrived in late September 1942. However, these pyres did not burn gas-chamber victims, as the orthodoxy claims, but thousands of victims of the raging typhus epidemic that had grown out of control in the summer of 1942. (See the entry on Birkenau, and the section on Auschwitz in the entry on mass graves.) These fires left quite an impression on the young man. But his legitimate seeing of crematoria buildings and open-air burnings does not prove any mass-extermination claim.

Considering the fallibility of human memory, and in particular the issue of false memories planted by 60 years of incessant one-sided propaganda, expecting an 83-year-old geriatric, utterly unfamiliar with actual revisionist research, to refute them is irresponsible at best, if not utterly ridiculous.

Due to his media appearances resulting from his BBC interview, Gröning was eventually indicted in Germany for aiding in the murder of at least 68,000 persons. After a show trial descending into a theater of the absurd in 2015, with a 94-year old defendant suffering from dementia reading from a script prepared for him, and accused by similarly old and demented witnesses (see Winter 2015), Gröning was sentenced to four years imprisonment. In 2018, at age 97, he was ordered to serve his time, but he died before setting foot in prison.