article_snippet.sent: At the time, Bauer, expressed the simple hope that "sooner or later, one of the accused would step forward and say: 'What took place -- it was horrific, I'm sorry.'
article_snippet.sent: The refusal of perpetrators to own up to perpetrators guilt remains one of the most disappointing aspects of Holocaust trials.
article_snippet.sent: Over the years, some defendants have acknowledged knowing of the exterminations, but have insisted that some defendants played no role.
article_snippet.sent: Those who acknowledged participating in the killing insisted that Those who acknowledged participating in the killing did so out of fear of life or limb.
article_snippet.sent: Over the years, an extraordinary research effort was dedicated to exploring the claim that SS men had engaged in extermination out of duress.
article_snippet.sent: The results were astonishing: Investigators and historians failed to uncover so much as a single instance in which a German officer or NCO had been executed or even severely punished for opting out of genocide.
article_snippet.sent: And even when a trial ended in a conviction, what was missing was any sense of moral reckoning, an acknowledgment on the part of the accused of the perversity of genocide.
article_snippet.sent: This moral guilt I acknowledge here, before the victims, with regret and humility.
article_snippet.sent: It was a crucial breakthrough, because It recognized that mass killing is not a personal act of evil but an exterminatory process.
article_snippet.sent: When it comes to factory-like genocide, guilt is not to be measured by acts of cruelty or nastiness; guilt follows function.
article_snippet.sent: But without the Munich court's conviction, Gröning's important acceptance of moral guilt will remain incomplete.
article_snippet.sent: April 24 marks the day that millions mourn the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by the Ottomans during World War I, an event many have described as genocide.
article_snippet.sent: And yet the Turkish nation itself remains in denial of the mass killings that unfolded a hundred years ago.
article_snippet.sent: With that in mind, Gröning's trial reminds us of other mass atrocities that still await their moment of moral and legal reckoning.
highlights_snippet.sent: : Other mass atrocities still await moment of moral reckoning .