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The case against Furchner relies on German legal precedent established in cases over the past decade that anyone who helped Nazi death camps and concentration camps function can be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there, even without evidence of participation in a specific crime.Ī defense lawyer told Der Spiegel magazine that the trial would center on whether the 96-year-old had knowledge of the atrocities that happened at the camp. Woman who survived Spanish flu, world war succumbs to COVID Her flight, he added, “should also affect the punishment.” “If she is healthy enough to flee, she is healthy enough to be incarcerated,” Zuroff told The Associated Press. “Apparently, that’s not exactly the case,” he said. German media identified her as Irmgard Furchner.Įfraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Jerusalem, said the defendant had claimed in a recent letter to the court that she was too frail to appear for trial.
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(AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, file)ĭespite her advanced age, the German woman was to be tried in juvenile court because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes. An elderly secretary of the former SS commandant of Stutthof is going on trial on Thursday in Germany on charges of more than 11,000 counts of accessory to murder. The court said in a statement before the trial that the defendant allegedly “aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office.” The wooden main gate leads into the former Nazi German Stutthof concentration camp in Sztutowo, Poland. Prosecutors argue that the woman was part of the apparatus that helped the Nazi camp function during World War II more than 75 years ago. Presiding judge Dominik Gross said the court had issued an arrest warrant, and it remained to be seen whether she would be caught. The 96-year-old woman left the home where she lives in a taxi on Thursday morning, heading for a subway station on the outskirts of Hamburg, German news agency dpa quoted Itzehoe state court spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer as saying. BERLIN (AP) - A former secretary for the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp was being sought on an arrest warrant Thursday after skipping the planned start of her trial in Germany on more than 11,000 counts of accessory to murder, officials said.