The Accountant of Auschwitz

THE ACCOUNTANT OF AUSCHWITZ is a story of legal triumph in the quest to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, in some cases 70 years after their crimes. Many Nazis went unpunished for crimes against humanity because early post-World War II legal theories required eyewitnesses to testify that individual Nazis perpetrated particular crimes, a high standard even for the Nuremberg trials that took place when everything was fresh in the minds of witnesses. Also, many Nazis were tried and acquitted, or sentenced and later released by the German government before completing their prison terms. The movie points out that many judges were Nazis and less likely to find against fellow Nazis, further distorting the post-War German justice process. One former American Nuremberg prosecutor recalls that only 22 of 3,000 possible Nazi defendants on his list were prosecuted in the 1940s because there were only 22 seats in the available courtroom. The revamped legal theory that allowed more recent prosecutions in Germany of John Demjanjuk, a Sobibor camp guard found living in America, and Oskar Groning, the so-called accountant of Auschwitz, was the notion that everyone working at these camps knew that Jews and others were brought there either to be worked to death or killed outright, thus anyone participating in any way in the assistance of that process was culpable. "I was told all the people who couldn't work were disposed of," Groning admits. Elderly Jewish witnesses testify to their brutal experiences in Auschwitz (one was a twin who miraculously survived after being injected with a disease by infamous Nazi doctor Mengele), and defendant Groning admitted that everything described at the trial indeed happened, making him a rare Nazi willing to corroborate the heinous acts of Germans during World War II.