[patwynnfan]

A former Nazi SS guard who was known as the "Bookkeeper of Auschwitz" has died aged 96, German media report. In 2015 Oskar Gröning was sentenced to four years' imprisonment, but never began his prison sentence due to a series of appeals. He died in a hospital on Friday, according to Spiegel Online. The pensioner was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. His job at Auschwitz was to itemise money and valuables taken from new arrivals, who were then killed or subjected to slave labour. Though a court doctor found that he was fit for prison with appropriate medical supervision, his jail term was repeatedly delayed by ill-health and requests for clemency.

When the war was over, Gröning slipped into a quiet life in Lüneburg Heath, Lower Saxony, where he worked in a glass-making factory. Decades later, when he heard people denying the Holocaust had ever happened, he was moved to break his silence. He was one of very few former concentration camp guards to do so. "I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria," he told the BBC in the 2005 documentary Auschwitz: the Nazis and the "Final Solution".

He should have been definitely jailed in 2005 but preferably jailed straight after the war.