German prosecutors have brought charges against a 95-year-old woman who they say helped carry out “the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners”, along with Polish partisans and Russian prisoners of war.
The woman, who testified against the Nazi camp commander in the 1950s and was the subject of an investigation since at least 2016, was charged with 10,000 counts of complicity in murder and an unspecified number of counts of complicity in attempted murder. murder.
In one point of contention, the case is being heard by a juvenile court because the woman was younger than 21 when she worked as a secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk on Poland’s Baltic coast, NPR reported.
The woman was not named, but senior prosecutor Peter Müller-Rakow used the term “Heranwachsenden” to refer to her. German law uses the term to refer to someone between the ages of 18 and 21.
She is said to have been 18 or 19 when she started working in the Nazi camp in June 1943. She was a close aide to the SS commander there until April 1945. In the camp, Zyklon B gas chambers were used to exterminate prisoners. More than 60,000 people died there.
In an interview with a German public broadcaster in late 2019, the woman, identified as “Irmgard F.”, said she has repeatedly given testimony to authorities about what she saw and did in the Stutthof camp. She claimed she was unaware of mass poisonings or other acts of genocide – in part because her office window was facing out from the camp, NPR reported. She said she never set foot in the camp, according to The Associated Press.
In 1957, Stutthof’s commander Paul-Werner Hoppe was sentenced to nine years in prison. He died in 1974. In the interview, Irmgard F said she testified at trial that all of Hoppe’s correspondence with the higher SS administration had passed her desk and that the commander had dictated her letters daily, the AP reported. She said she did not know that inmates were being gassed, but told authorities at the time that she knew Hoppe had ordered executions, which she believed were punishments for wrongdoing.
Last year, Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former guard in the Stutthof camp, was convicted of complicity in the murder of more than 5,200 prisoners – but was released with a two-year suspended sentence. Witnesses at his trial included Asia Shindelman, then 91, who survived the camp and eventually settled in Wayne, NJ.