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 supporters 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, was charged with 10,000 counts of accessories to the murder and a number unspecified accessory to 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 at the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk on the Baltic coast of Poland, NPR reported.
The woman was not named, but Chief 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 had been 18 or 19 years old when she began working in the Nazi camp in June 1943. She was a close aide to the SS commander until April 1945. The camp was used by Zyklon B gas chambers. to exterminate the prisoners. More than 60,000 people died there.
In an interview with a German public broadcaster in late 2019, the woman, who was identified as “Irmgard F.,” said she has repeatedly testified to authorities about what she saw and did at Stutthof camp. . He stated that he was not aware of the mass poisonings or other acts of genocide, in part because the window of his office was facing the countryside, NPR reported. He said he never set foot on the field, according to The Associated Press.
In 1957, Stutthof commander Paul-Werner Hoppe was sentenced to nine years in prison. He died in 1974. In the interview, Irmgard F said he testified at his trial that all of Hoppe’s correspondence with the SS top administration had passed over his desk and that the commander had dictated his letters daily, the AP reported. He said he did not know the prisoners had been gassed, but he told authorities at the time that he knew Hoppe had ordered the executions, which he meant as punishment for infractions.
Last year, Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former guard at Stutthof camp, was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of more than 5,200 prisoners, but was released on a two-year suspended prison sentence. Among the witnesses to his trial was then Asia Shindelman, 91, who survived the camp and eventually settled in Wayne, New Jersey.