Interview with an Auschwitz Guard: 'I Do Not Feel Like a Criminal'

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spiegel-interview-with-a-91-year-old-former-auschwitz-guard-a-988127.html



As a young man, Jakob W. worked in the watchtowers of Auschwitz. Charges against him were recently dropped, but he described to SPIEGEL what it was like to be a cog in the Nazis' horrific machinery of death.

Interview with an Auschwitz Guard: 'I Do Not Feel Like a Criminal'
Interview Conducted by Felix Bohr, Cordula Meyer and Klaus Wiegrefe
August 28, 2014 – 02:24 PM

Jakob W. was 19-years-old and in his third semester studying architecture at college when he received the letter that would, seven decades later, turn him into a suspect for complicity in murder.

In the summer of 1942, the young man from a village near Belgrade received his draft notice. Just a few months later, he was standing on a tower hundreds of kilometers away from his home in Yugoslavia. Jakob W. was now an SS guard in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp -- and thus a party in the most horrific of the crimes committed by the Third Reich. For two and a half years, he looked down at the factory of human annihilation, day in and day out.

Now, in 2014, Jakob W. lives in a large, southern German city, his house plastered white and his garden filled with roses. A chain-link fence separates his yard from the neighbor's. A retired civil servant with a degree in architecture, W. has lived here for more than 30 years. Wearing jeans, a plaid shirt and black leather shoes, he settles in the living room on a black leather couch, covered in a wool blanket. The room is crammed with carpets; an oak china cabinet overflows with knick-knacks. Above the sofa is an oil painting of a mountain lake at sunrise.

Jakob W. was one of the 30 people targeted by German prosecutors in the fall of 2013, suspected of being accessories to multiple murders. Given the advanced age of the suspects, it is likely that these will be the last legal proceedings in Germany relating to Nazi war crimes.