Prosecutors estimate 13,335 people were sent to gas chambers during time he served as SS guard
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Getty
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German prosecutors have charged a 94-year-old former SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp as an accessory to murder.
Prosecutors in Stuttgart said the unidentified suspect, a German national born in Serbia, was charged as a juvenile because he was 19 at the time of the alleged offences.
They say he served as a guard at Auschwitz in late 1942 and early 1943, and estimate 13,335 people were sent to the gas chambers during that time.
Remembering the Holocaust
Remembering the Holocaust
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80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich
Hannah Bills
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Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside.
Hannah Bills
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Hannah Bills
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Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland
Hannah Bills
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The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I
Hannah Bills
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A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp
Hannah Bills
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Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz
Hannah Bills
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A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp
Hannah Bills
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The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions
Hannah Bills
10/16
Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation
Hannah Bills
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Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers
Hannah Bills
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Hannah Bills
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The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again
Hannah Bills
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A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Hannah Bills
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"The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split
Hannah Bills
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Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks.
Hannah Bills
1/16
80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich
Hannah Bills
2/16
Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside.
Hannah Bills
3/16
Hannah Bills
4/16
Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland
Hannah Bills
5/16
The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I
Hannah Bills
6/16
A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp
Hannah Bills
7/16
Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz
Hannah Bills
8/16
A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp
Hannah Bills
9/16
The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions
Hannah Bills
10/16
Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation
Hannah Bills
11/16
Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers
Hannah Bills
12/16
Hannah Bills
13/16
The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again
Hannah Bills
14/16
A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Hannah Bills
15/16
"The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split
Hannah Bills
16/16
Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks.
Hannah Bills
According to prosecutors, the suspect has said via his lawyer he wasn’t aware of the background and aims of what was happening, or of details of the killings.
The suspect has been charged on the premise that, as a guard, he helped the camp function.
Earlier this year, another former Auschwitz guard died before he could serve four years in prison for his role as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 of the death camp's roughly one million victims.
He never began his prison sentence due to a series of appeals.
Groening came to attention in 2005, after giving interviews about his work in the camp as an attempt to persuade Holocaust deniers that the genocide of around 6 million Jewish people had taken place.
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