Oskar Groening, known as the ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’, was found guilty in July 2015 of being an accessory to the murders of 300,000 people at the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland.
Groening has not yet begun his sentence after filing an appeal for the sentence to be suspended because of health concerns.
Despite protestations from Groening’s lawyers, the court insisted “appropriate precautionary measures” would be taken to meet any special needs he has in prison.
The court in Celle in northern Germany ruled: ‘Based on expert opinion, the superior regional court finds that the convicted individual is fit to serve out the term despite his advanced age.”
Groening had been living at home despite being convicted and it had been unclear whether the former Auschwitz guard would be jailed.
In a 2015 court battle seen as one of the last major Holocaust trials, prosecutors said although Groening did not kill anyone himself while working at Auschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, he helped support the regime responsible for mass murder by sorting bank notes seized from trainloads of arriving Jews.
Groening, who admitted he was morally guilty, said he was an enthusiastic Nazi when he was sent to work at Auschwitz in 1942, at the age of 21.
He was born in 1921 in Lower Saxony in Germany and joined the Hitler Youth when the Nazis came to power in 1933.
His mother died when he was just four-years-old but his father was said to be a proud nationalist.
After the war Groening led a quite life in Lueneburg Heath in Lower Saxony, working at a glass-making factory until he retired.
Groening has publicly discussed his role, and in 2005 BBC documentary Auschwitz: the Nazis and the “Final Solution”, said: “I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria.
“I was on the ramp when the selections [for the gas chambers] took place.”
Auschwitz was the scene of some of the worst atrocities seen during the Second World War and more than one million people, most of the European Jews, died there between 1940 and 1945.
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder on Wednesday welcomed a German court ruling that 96-year former Nazi SS guard Oskar Groening, known as the ‘bookkeeper of Auschwitz’, is fit to serve his four-year prison sentence, despite his age.
“The World Jewish Congress is encouraged by the German court’s ruling to uphold Oskar Groening’s four-year sentence. It was the right decision to bring him to trial, the right decision to sentence him to prison, and the right decision to enforce his prison term.
“There should be no impunity for any criminal involved in mass murder or genocide. It is never too late for justice to be served. We commend the court in Celle for today’s ruling, and hope that judicial authorities in other European countries will follow their lead in bringing the perpetrators of the biggest crime in the history of mankind to justice.”