BERLIN – Accomplice because he was there. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t kill anyone. Accomplice because he put himself at the service of the most ruthless factory of death that humanity has ever conceived. Accomplice because he worked for the extermination machine. The German Federal Supreme Court has confirmed the sentence against the former SS officer Oskar Gröning , the “Auschwitz accountant” who was sentenced to four years in prison last year for murder.

The High Court has written a new page in German jurisprudence, which is fundamental for those seeking justice for the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The news is that the judges ruled in the Lüneburg court, which a year ago considered Gröning jointly responsible for 300,000 prisoners killed in the Nazi camp during the period he worked there (between 1942 and ’45). It is irrelevant that he did not materially participate in a murder. It is important that he was there when the Nazi extermination machine produced thousands every day.

So far tens of thousands of Nazis have escaped a sentence of condemnation precisely because German law required judges to prove that they had directly participated in the killings. In 2011 a first turning point came, with the verdict against John Demjanjuk, the guard of Sobibor, convicted for the murder of 28,000 Jews for the mere fact of being in the camp. A sentence never executed because Demjanjuk had died shortly after.

Then the Federal Supreme Court had not had time to affect that verdict in the tables of the law. This time yes. But the obvious question, now that almost all the torturers have died, is whether or not this is a somewhat late sentence.