State prosecutors in Germany have charged a 95-year-old woman with her role in supporting the Nazi assassination machinery as a secretary in a concentration camp, accusing her of 10,000 charges of being an aid in murder and complicity in attempted murder.
The charge against the woman, who according to German privacy laws was only identified as Irmgard F., followed a five-year investigation, prosecutors said Friday. Because she was under 21 at the time of the offenses she is accused of, they would have said, she will be tried in a juvenile court, where she will likely receive a lighter sentence.
Between June 1943 and April 1945, the woman worked as a secretary for the camp commander at the Stutthof camp, 20 miles from the Polish city of Gdansk, then known as Danzig under German rule.
“This is about the concrete responsibility she had in the day-to-day functioning of the camp,” said Peter Müller-Rakow of the state prosecutor in Itzehoe, north of Hamburg.
A regional court will decide whether to prosecute and start a trial, a process that can take months to years.
Last year, a 93-year-old man was convicted in a juvenile court in Hamburg of aiding and abetting 5,230 murders when he was a 17-year-old guard at Stutthof.
It is believed that more than 60,000 people died or died in Stutthof, which was the first concentration camp set up by the Nazi regime outside Germany’s borders.
With the last people carrying out near-death atrocities for the Nazi regime, the German authorities insisted on bringing as many of them as possible to justice.
John Demjanjuk, who worked as a car worker in the United States for many years, was convicted in a Munich court in 2011 on charges of the murder of 28,000 Jews when he was a guard in the Sobibor camp in 1943 in the German-occupied Poland was.
After that case, other local prosecutors began investigating the responsibility of other surviving concentration camp guards and charged them with accessory to many murders as opposed to individual, documented murders.
In 2018, another former guard of the Stutthof camp is executed, but the process was eventually suspended because the accused, who died in 2019, was often too bad to attend.
“This is a real milestone in judicial liability,” said Onur Özata, a lawyer representing survivors in the trial of the former camp secretary. “The fact that a secretary in this system, a bureaucratic cogwheel, can be brought to justice is something new.”
The case will depend on whether the former secretary played a role in the atrocities committed by guards in the camp.
Prosecutors said she admitted that much of the correspondence related to the camp and that many files crossed her desk, and that she knew of the murders of prisoners. But she claims she did not know that a large number of prisoners in the camp were killed during the time she worked there. According to media reports, she also said that her office window was pointed away from the camp, so she could not see what was going on.
“It is fair to say that the majority of these women knew about the persecution of the Jews and that some of them knew that they had been killed,” said Rachel Century, a British historian, who authored a book on female executives. in the Third Reich, said. “But some secretaries had roles that gave them more access to information than others.”
The state prosecutor in Itzehoe investigated and questioned the case for five years with survivors in the United States and Israel, as well as the former camp secretary. They also hired an independent historian to make an assessment.
“This is a very complicated matter,” he said. Müller-Rakow said.
According to the public broadcaster who interviewed her last year, Ms F. was in court as a witness in 1957, when the commander of the camp, Paul Werner Hoppe, was on trial. Mr. Hoppe was convicted of his crimes, but was released in the 1960s and died in 1974. Prosecutors did not provide information about the life of the former camp secretary after she served in Stutthof.
“The court cases are also important because, in addition to historical research, it helps to document and clarify Nazi crimes, and because it brings the subject to the public’s attention,” said Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald- and Mittelbau-Dora concentration, said. camps memorial.