Oskar Gröning, was sentenced on Wednesday

LÜNEBURG, Germany — In what is likely to be among the last chances to bring justice for the Holocaust, a German court convicted a 94-year-old former SS soldier of colluding in mass murder, and delivered an unstinting depiction both of the horrors of Auschwitz and the depths of German guilt.

The former soldier, Oskar Gröning, was sentenced on Wednesday to four years in jail for complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews who were brought to the Nazis’ grimmest death camp in the summer of 1944.

In a sweeping 75-minute speech, Judge Franz Kompisch presented what amounted to a reckoning with decades of German justice and the failure to prosecute thousands of perpetrators. The judge made it plain that every German had a choice about how far to go along with the Nazis.

“This is a point that must be made clearly,” the judge said. To join the SS and take “a safe desk job” at Auschwitz “was your decision.” He added, “It was perhaps affected by the era, but it was not because you were unfree.”

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