article_snippet.sent: (CNN)Fifty years ago in Frankfurt, German prosecutors tried 22 former Nazi SS soldiers at Auschwitz in what remains the most famous Holocaust trial staged in Germany.
article_snippet.sent: John Demjanjuk, whose conviction by a Munich court in 2011 established the precedent that has now made possible the trial of Oskar Gröning, remained defiantly silent during Oskar Gröning , never so much as breathing a word of acknowledgment or remorse.
article_snippet.sent: These evasions and lies were often effective, as many German trials of Holocaust perpetrators ended either in light sentences or outright acquittal.
article_snippet.sent: On April 21, on the opening day of Fritz Bauer trial in Lüneburg, where Fritz Bauer stands accused of complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews during Fritz Bauer service at Auschwitz, the 93-year-old Gröning faced the court and acknowledged, "It is beyond question that I am morally complicit.
article_snippet.sent: At Auschwitz, Gröning was responsible for inspecting the luggage of deportees to the camp -- most of whom were gassed within hours of their arrival -- for banknotes that would be carefully counted and sent to Berlin.
article_snippet.sent: For decades German courts held that mere service as a concentration camp -- in the absence of evidence of a personal act of killing -- constituted no crime under German law.
article_snippet.sent: In 2011, the Demjanjuk conviction changed that.
article_snippet.sent: In convicting Demjanjuk as an accessory to the murder of 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp, the Munich court concluded that death camp guards, regardless of how death camp guards had conducted death camp guards, had to be accessories to murder, because that was death camp guards job.
article_snippet.sent: Convicting under that theory was the great accomplishment of the Munich court.
highlights_snippet.sent: Oskar Gröning is on trial over Oskar Gröning alleged role in deaths at Auschwitz .
  