He actually did. He has been VERY public about who he is, where he was, and what he did since at least the 1980s when he started trying to combat Holocaust Denial, which he has been doing since. Up until now, there was not a crime to charge him with, or at least not a legal framework under which to charge him, precisely because he was not involved in the mass murder directly.I don't really believe he "feels bad" about it. If he really felt so bad about it, he would have turned himself in decades ago. Instead, he's 93 years old. He knows he's unlikely to live much longer. He has nothing to lose at this point. So pardon me if I don't think he genuinely feels remorse for being involved in crimes against humanity.
Now, German prosecutors are trying out a brand new legal theory under which to charge him with Accessory to Murder. Whether it will work is an open question. He admits factual guilt, but criminal liability is another matter entirely, and that is a matter for the german courts.
Here are the facts
He joined the SS in 1940 after being indoctrinated in Nazism from the age of 12. His original posting was in Salary Administration. In 1942, the SS changed its institutional rules such that desk jobs were reserved for injured combat veterans, and he was reassigned. He was posted to Auschwitz as a property clerk. When he witnessed his first atrocity he immediately asked for a transfer to a front line fighting unit on the eastern front. He never killed anyone while at Auschwitz. He never assisted in murder, body disposal, or anything of the sort. He did handle what amounts to stolen property. Eventually, he was able to secure transfer to a front-line unit, and survived to be captured by the British in 1945.
There was no order that he had a moral duty to disobey other than an Auschwitz posting, which was largely a matter of happenstance from the perspective of an SS enlisted man, and he did not know the purpose of the camp until he got there.
Those are the facts. Indisputable. All matters of public record and true by his own admittance in numerous BBC documentaries that have featured him as a primary source.
So, please do learn the facts of a case before you shoot your mouth off.
Now, as I understand it, the prosecution's theory is that anyone attached to the Machine of Death, even tangentially, is guilty of being an accessory to the Machine of Death, provided they knew what it was. A property clerk? Guilty. Himmler's car driver? Guilty. There are not many people left to prosecute under this legal theory, and the legal reasoning might not hold up in German courts. Or it might. That is up to the German courts.