German soldier Oskar Groening, aged 93, is being tried for his participation in the Third Reich’s organization of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. From May 16 through to July 11, 1944, he witnessed 425,000 Hungarian Jews arrive aboard 137 trains of which 300,000 were sent to gas chambers and the remainder were put in slave labor.

Groening’s job at the time was to sort the possessions of the doomed, looking through their clothes, shoes, money and other valuables. Among the possessions he found diamonds and gold worth millions that he ensured got to Berlin. For this reason, his nickname was “Book-keeper of Auschwitz.” Now, he is being tried for this role in a court case that begins on Tuesday and is expected to be the last Nazi war crimes trial that aims to bring a small measure of justice for the tragic victims.

Groening insists that he is haunted by nightmares of what he witnessed and that he was a young man at the time more interested in girls and beer halls. In 1948 he had been cleared of war crimes, but now he is being charged as being an accessory. He states that at one point a drunken SS agent flung a crying Jewish baby against the side of a truck, smashing its head. Groening says that he still experiences nightmares from the scenes he witnessed and had even gone to his superior officers to apply for a transfer to the front just to escape.