German prosecutors filed charges against a 95-year-old woman who they said helped to carry out “the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners”, along with Polish guerrillas and Russian prisoners of war.
The woman, who testified against the Nazi camp commander in the 1950s and has been the subject of an investigation since at least 2016, has been charged with 10,000 counts of accomplice to murder and an unspecified number of counts of accomplice 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 in the concentration camp at Stutthof near Gdansk, on the Baltic coast of Poland, the NPR reported.
The woman was not identified, but senior 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 must 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. The camp used Zyklon B gas chambers to exterminate prisoners. Over 60,000 people were killed there.
In an interview with a German public broadcaster in late 2019, the woman, who was identified as “Irmgard F.”, said she has repeatedly given witnesses’ reports to authorities about what she saw and did in the Stutthof camp. She claimed she was not aware of mass poisoning or other acts of genocide – partly because her office window was facing out of the camp, NPR reported. She said she never set foot in the camp itself, 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 he testified in his trial that all of Hoppe’s correspondence with the SS top management passed through his desk and that the commander dictated his letters daily, the AP reported. She said she did not know of prisoners being killed with gas, but told authorities at the time that she knew that Hoppe had ordered executions, which she presumed was a punishment for infractions.
Last year, Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former guard from the Stutthof camp, was convicted of being an accomplice in the murder of more than 5,200 prisoners – but escaped with a two-year suspended prison sentence. Among the witnesses to his trial was Asia Shindelman, 91, who survived the camp and ended up settling in Wayne, NJ.