Public prosecutors in Germany have indicted a 95-year-old woman for her role in supporting the Nazi murder machine as a secretary in a concentration camp, accusing her of 10,000 charges of being an accessory to murder and complicity in assassination attempts.
The charge against the woman, identified only as Irmgard F. under German privacy laws, came after a five-year investigation, prosecutors said on Friday. Since she was under 21 at the time of the crimes of which she is accused, they said, she would be tried in a juvenile court, where she is likely to receive a milder sentence.
The woman worked between June 1943 and April 1945 as secretary to the commander of the Stutthof camp, 20 miles from the Polish city of Gdansk, which was known as Danzig under German rule at the time.
“It’s about the concrete responsibility she had for the daily running of the camp,” said Peter Müller-Rakow, from the public prosecutor’s office in Itzehoe, north of Hamburg.
A regional court will decide whether to proceed with the prosecution and start a trial, a process that can take anywhere from a few months to years.
Last year, a 93-year-old man was convicted in a juvenile court in Hamburg for being an accomplice in 5,230 murders when he was a 17-year-old guard at Stutthof.
More than 60,000 people are believed to have died or been killed in Stutthof, which was the first concentration camp to be established by the Nazi regime outside Germany’s borders.
With the last people involved in the execution of atrocities against the Nazi regime close to death, German authorities have been striving to bring as many as possible to justice.
John Demjanjuk, who worked for years as a self-employed person in the United States, was found guilty in a Munich court in 2011 on charges of killing 28,000 Jews when he was a guard in the Sobibor camp in Germany-occupied Poland in 1943.
After that case, other local prosecutors began investigating the responsibility of other surviving concentration camp guards, accusing them of being accomplices in many murders, as opposed to documented individual murders.
In 2018, another former Stutthof camp guard was put on trial, but that process was eventually suspended because the accused, who died in 2019, was often too ill to appear.
“It is a real milestone in judicial responsibility,” said Onur Özata, a lawyer who represents the survivors at the trial of the former camp secretary. “The fact that a secretary in this system, a bureaucratic gear, can be brought to justice is something new.”
The case will depend on whether the former secretary played a role in the atrocities perpetrated by the guards inside the camp.
Prosecutors said she admitted that much of the correspondence related to the camp and many files crossed her desk, and that she knew of some murders of inmates. But she says she does not know that a large number of camp inmates were killed by gas during the time she worked there. She also said that her office window pointed away from the camp, so that she could not see what was happening, according to media reports.
“It is fair to say that most of these women knew about the persecution of Jews and some of them knew that they were murdered,” said Rachel Century, a British historian who wrote a book about women administrators in the Third Reich. “But some secretaries had functions that gave them more access to information than others.”
The prosecutor’s office in Itzehoe has been investigating the case for five years, interviewing survivors in the United States and Israel, as well as the former camp secretary. They also hired an independent historian to make an assessment.
“It is a highly complicated case,” said Müller-Rakow.
According to the public broadcaster who interviewed her last year, Ms. F. was in court as a witness in 1957, when camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe went on trial. Mr. Hoppe was convicted of his crimes, but he was released in the 1960s and died in 1974. Prosecutors did not provide details of the former camp secretary’s life after she served at Stutthof.
“Lawsuits are also important because, in addition to historical research, they help to document and clarify Nazi crimes and because they bring the matter to the attention of the public,” said Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.