95 year old “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz” will serve jail time for his conviction as an “accessory to murder”

Oskar Groening, defendant & former Nazi SS officer dubbed the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, is shown in the photo above as he listens to the verdict during his trial in Lueneburg, Germany, July 15, 2015. The 94-year-old German man who worked as a bookkeeper at the Auschwitz death camp was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people and was sentenced to four years in prison, in what could be one of the last big Holocaust trials, Lueneburg, Germany, July 15, 2015. REUTERS/Axel Heimken/Pool

The following quote is from a recent news article which you can read in full at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oskar-groening-fit-prison-nazi-auschwitz_us_5982c81de4b06d488874337b

Begin quote from news article:

A 96-year-old former Nazi guard and SS officer known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” has been deemed fit to serve jail time for his 2015 conviction as an accessory to murder, German prosecutors say.

Kathrin Soefker, a spokeswoman for prosecutors in Hanover, northern Germany, said doctors had determined that Oskar Groening was well enough to start his four-year prison sentence, so long as he was able to receive “appropriate medical care” while incarcerated.

“A 96-year-old has physical constraints but … he is fit for prison,” Soefker said.

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Oscar Groening is a former SS man who worked at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He has admitted, in the past, that Jews were killed in gas chambers at this camp.

Groening said that the gassing of the Jews, in two old farmhouses, took place at night. As told by writer Laurence Rees in one of his books, Groening said that he had witnessed a gassing one night after he had been awakened by an alarm because a number of Jews had escaped as they were being marched to the gas chamber.

Groening said that he saw the lights on in one of the farm houses, and seven or eight bodies out in front of the building. He assumed that these were the bodies of the escapees who had been caught and shot.

Groening was “overcome by curiosity,” according to Rees. Groening and his comrades then stayed around one night to watch what was going on at the farm house. They claimed that they saw an SS man, wearing a gas mask, pour Zyklon-B pellets through a hatch in the side of the cottage wall. They heard screaming for a minute, followed by silence. Then an SS man went up to the door, and looked through a peephole to see if all the prisoners were dead.

Groening said that this remote area was considered to be a good location for the use of Zyklon-B which was a dangerous poison that had the potential to kill the SS men who were throwing it inside the building.

Until March 1942, the gassing of the Jews had allegedly been done in Krema I at the Auschwitz main camp. Krema I was situated between the SS hospital and the Gestapo building, not a good location for the use of  a dangerous poisonous gas. That is why a new location for gassing had to be found.

In his autobiography, Rudolf Hoess, the  former Commandant at Auschwitz-Birkenau, wrote regarding the gassing in the little white house:

Begin quote from the autobiography of Rudolf Hoess:

“Hundreds of men and women in the full bloom of life walked all unsuspecting to their death in the gas chambers under the blossom-laden fruit trees of the orchard. This picture of death in the midst of life remains with me to this day. I looked upon them as enemies of our people. The reasons behind the Extermination Program seemed to me [to be] right.”

End quote from autobiography of Rudolf Hoess

Should Harry Potter be used to teach children about the Holocaust?

You can read about Harry Potter and the Holocaust in this news article: http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/02/scholars-want-to-use-harry-potter-to-teach-kids-about-the-holocaust/

The following quote is from the news article:

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Religious scholars recommended that teachers use the “Harry Potter” book series to help children understand the Holocaust in a Monday book review.

Brigid Coggin, teacher of Holocaust presentations, and Vanessa Zoltan, research assistant at Harvard Divinity School, made their suggestion in an article for Tablet Magazine. The authors lauded the youth fantasy series as a capable allegory for certain elements of the Holocaust that children may not initially understand, given their limited frames of reference.

“The combination of the fantastical and the specific horrors meet children where they are to help them understand the insanity of oppression and the reality of trauma,” the article reads.

The authors suggested that a blind, beaten dragon forced to guard a bank vault could serve as an allegory for Kapos, prisoners in concentration camps forced to work as supervisors. The torture of Hermoine at the hands of the Death Eaters, according to Coggin and Zoltan, could help children understand suffering. The authors used various other examples of evil and suffering from the books to suggest that Harry Potter could offer a theodicy, an explanation for evil in life, to young students.

Coggin and Zoltan ultimately claimed that the titular character’s reliance on the past for the courage to face evil would be valuable in teaching youth about the Holocaust.

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Sorry, but I think that this is the worst idea that I have ever heard of. This would trivialize the Holocaust in a way that has never been done before.