Original subtitles

(lively instrumental music)

- The main camp of Auschwitz was like a small town,

with its gossiping and chatting.

There was a canteen.

There was a cinema.

(cheery song in German)

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 Gröning is charged

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

Gröning is now 93 years old.

(sorrowful music)

- 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 whe.

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 Gröning

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 Gröning.

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

70 years before is still

guilty of the crime.

- The first time I've heard of Oskar Gröning

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 Gröning, and you and the past;

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

- Gröning 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 perpetrats

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.

- Lüneburg 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...

Lüneburg had never experienced anything like it

and hardly any German city ever has.

The trial took place in Lüneburg

because this is where Gröning 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 centre

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.

*** - 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.

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 Gröning 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!

(indistinct talking and shouting)

There was some disturbance from right-wing people.

So the lawyer Thomas Walther called

six weeks before the Gröning 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.

- 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.

(people chanting and shouting in German)

They shouted out loud and even shared

some papers.

Our friends put up the banner

to show that there will be

justice for the survivors.

(talking in German)

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 Höss, and Rainer Höss

is a big advocate against the neo-Nazis.

- I'm the grandson of Rudolf Höss,

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 Gröning 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.

(cameras clicking)

(cameras clicking)

- We were sitting in one section of the courtroom

and opposite us

this frail old man walking with a walker

walked in. (cameras clicking)

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.

(cameras clicking)

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.

- The trial made big headlines because Oskar Gröning

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. Gröning 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 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 punishe,

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.

(soft music)

- 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 everyday 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 Herman 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.

(inaudible talking)

***

***

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 that 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 1960's and 1970's.

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 crim?

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 90's?

(phone ringing)

- 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 Gröning case.

- John Demjanjuk, originally Ivan Demjanjuk,

immigrated to the United States around 1950

claiming to be a refugee.

(camera clicking) - Interestingly,

on his US visa application,

he listed

as his residence from some time in the 1930's

to 1943

"Sobibor, comma, Poland."

Sobibor is a word that should

send a chill up the spine

of every person in 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 70's.

(clamouring)

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

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."

(honking) 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.

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.

- 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!

(crowd cheering)

- 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 U.S. citizenship,

finding that he served the Nazis during World War Two

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 re-open 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 U.S. 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. (soft piano music)

- 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

at the Sobibor death camp, is finally going

to stand trial for his crimes is extremely important.

We are extremely pleased, and I think

that the American and German authorities

deserve a tremendous amount of credit

for their perseverance in this case.

(beeping)

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

- He's walking. - Yeah.

(soft piano music)

- 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 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

They were taken a few days before he was detained.

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

is he tried to basically

create the impression of being incompetent.

(dramatic classical music)

(inaudible talking)

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.

(cameras clicking) - 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! Oh! (recorded applause)

- 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?

(siren blaring) ***

- 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 1980's. 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 1 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 Lüneburg.

They got Gröning. 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 grandfath,

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. Gröning 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?

- Gröning 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.

- Gröning 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 collecte

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 labour camp,

and it was part death camp.

If these guards were just associated

with the slave labour 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 la.

In the case of Gröning,

we know that Gröning 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 Gröning 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, uncle and I, we were selected for slave labour.

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 labour 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 2 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.

(indistinct chatter)

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 Gröning 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 ok. 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,

"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 Gröning,

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.

(indistinct chatter)

- 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 even more shocking was that 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 Gröning.

- An embrace between two people is touching people

around the world.

We begin tonight with an amazing story.

A Terra 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 Lüneburg

because the world's press were all around her.

Everybody caught onto this forgiveness business, you se.

- 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 Gröning

by making him a friend.

- Gröning, 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. Gröning

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. Gröning.

- He exposed himself.

And that was a positive thing to do,

clearly, a courageous thing to do.

I think that's a very important extenuating circumstance.

And to me,

that would have been sufficient reason to not prosecute him.

(indistinct chatter)

- Mr. Gröning 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,

the decision whether he is guilty or not

has to be taken by the court,

and that cannot be made by Mr. Gröning.

- Oh, I think the testimony of Oskar Gröning

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,

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.

(indistinct yelling)

(crowd chanting)

- 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.

(speaking in German)

- I wanted Gröning 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 Gröning,

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.

(suspenseful music)

- An extraordinary moment in Germany

when the sins of World War Two finally caught up

with a man known as the "Accountant of Auschwitz".

He was convicted and sentenced to 4 years in prison,

in what is likely one of the last Nazi trials

we will ever witness.

(speaking in German)

- It was emotional.

- The fact that he only got four years,

I think with the same effort,

the judge could have given him a hundred 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 colour,

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.

***