
A 96-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary who absconded before her trial appeared in court in Germany on Tuesday to face charges of aiding and abetting murder.
The first woman to be prosecuted for Nazi-era crimes in decades, Irmgard Furchner is charged with complicity in the killing of more than 11,000 people at Stutthof camp in Poland.
Between June 1943 and April 1945, the accused worked in the office of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe. Prosecutors say she took dictation of the SS officer’s orders and handled his correspondence.
Roughly 65,000 people died at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk, among them “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war,” according to the indictment read out by public prosecutor Maxi Wantzen.
A teenager at the time the alleged crimes were committed, Furchner is being tried in a juvenile court.
Wantzen said the defendant’s clerical work at Stutthof “assured the smooth running of the camp” and gave her “knowledge of all occurrences and events at Stutthof,” including mass killings.
The prosecutor said that the suffering of victims sent to the camp’s gas chambers including cries and jostling at the bolted doors were “clearly audible” to all at the camp.
Moreover, the “life-threatening conditions” with food and water shortages and the spread of deadly diseases including typhus were intentionally maintained and immediately apparent.
Read more at Times of Israel.
{Matzav.com}
There is no way she could have been a secretary there without knowing what was going on.
Even if all she did was order food and pay bills she could not possibly have not known that tens of thousands of people are arriving at the camp and being murdered without any trial or being accused of any crimes.
Yemoch shmoh
yes, but she is 96 and very likely unable to hurt anyone for the rest of her sad life
Why was she not tried earlier?