German prosecutors have filed charges against a 95-year-old woman who they say helped carry out “the systematic murder of Jewish prisoners”, along with Polish partisans and Russian prisoners of war.
The woman, who testified against the commander of the Nazi camp in the 1950s and has been under investigation since at least 2016, has been charged with 10,000 counts of murder and an indefinite number of counts of attempted murder.
In a twist, the case is being handled by a juvenile court because the woman was under 21 when she worked as a secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk on the Baltic coast of Poland, NPR reported.
The woman was not named, but senior state prosecutor Peter Müller-Rakow used the term “Heranwachsenden” to refer to her. German law uses the term to refer to someone between 18 and 21 years old.
She would have been 18 or 19 years old when she started working at the Nazi camp in June 1943. She was a close assistant to the SS commander there until April 1945. The camp was one that used Zyklon B gas chambers to exterminate prisoners. More than 60,000 people died.
In an interview with a German public broadcaster at the end of 2019, the woman, known as ‘Irmgard F.’ identified, said she repeatedly gave evidence reports to authorities about what she saw and did in the Stutthof camp. She claimed she was not aware of mass poisonings or other acts of genocide – in part because her office window was facing out of the camp, NPR reported. According to The Associated Press, she said she never set foot in the camp herself.
In 1957 the commander of Stutthof, Paul-Werner Hoppe, was sentenced to nine years in prison. He died in 1974. In the interview, Irmgard F said that during his trial she testified that all of Hoppe’s correspondence with senior SS administration was past her desk and that the commander dictated her letters daily, the AP reported. She said she did not know that prisoners had been gassed, but told authorities at the time that she was aware that Hoppe had ordered executions, which she said were punishable for offenses.
Last year, Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former guard at the Stutthof camp, was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of more than 5,200 prisoners – but was given a two-year suspended prison sentence. Among the witnesses during his trial was then 91-year-old Asia Shindelman, who survived the camp and eventually settled in Wayne, NJ.