Atrocity Then, Trial Now: The Aesthetics, Acoustics, and Visualities of Prosecuting Oskar Gröning

Abstract

Charged with aiding and abetting in the murder of three hundred thousand Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz between 16 May 1944 and 11 July 1944, Oskar Gröning, the ‘bookkeeper of Auschwitz’, was sentenced in 2015 by the Lüneburg Regional Court to four years’ imprisonment. After a series of unsuccessful appeals, Gröning died in 2018, at the age of 96, having never spent a day in jail. This contribution unpacks the charges against Gröning and his resultant conviction; examines the involvement of elderly victims as accusers and their roles in this trial; and, ultimately, contemplates how it all ‘looked’ and ‘sounded’. The focus is thus not only on Gröning himself, but on the totality of the trial of Gröning. Throughout, this contribution gazes upon the aesthetics, acoustics, and visualities of this trial and interrogates the representational credibility of dallied proceedings that occur seventy – increasingly, eighty – years after the fact. This chapter concludes by positing that however absurd it may seem to put a feeble old man on trial, the feebleness that oozes from not prosecuting such a man may prove even more absurd.