German Police have arrested a former secretary for the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp who skipped and reportedly flee the planned start Thursday of her trial in Germany. She was picked up several hours later after the court issued an arrest warrant.
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. The court issued the warrant and delayed the reading of the indictment until the next scheduled hearing on Oct. 19 because that couldn’t be done in the defendant’s absence.
The officers will take her to a court that will decide whether to jail her, despite her old age, for fleeing the hearing, or guarantee by other means that she will not skip the next one in October, court spokesperson; Frederike Milhoffer said.
The former secretary who is standing trial on more than 11,000 counts of accessory to murder, is
the first woman to face charges for many years.
German media identified her as Irmgard Furchner.
Prosecutors accused her this year of aiding “the systematic killing” of prisoners between 1943 and 1945 when she was the stenographer and typist of the commandant of Stutthof camp in Poland. A juvenile court will hear the case because she was between 18 and 19 years old at the time of the alleged crimes.
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.
Efraim 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.
“Apparently, that’s not exactly the case,” he said.
“If she is healthy enough to flee, she is healthy enough to be incarcerated,” Zuroff told The Associated Press. Her flight, he added, “should also affect the punishment.”
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.
A defense lawyer who spoke to Der Spiegel magazine said the trial would center on whether the 96-year-old knew about the atrocities that happened at the camp.
“My client worked in the midst of SS men who were experienced in violence — however, does that mean she shared their state of knowledge? That is not necessarily obvious,” lawyer Wolf Molkentin said.
According to other media reports, Furchner was questioned as a witness during past Nazi trials and said at the time that the former SS commandant of Stutthof, Paul Werner Hoppe, dictated daily letters and radio messages to her.
Furchner testified she was not aware of the killings that occurred at the camp while she worked there.
Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called “work education camp” where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.
From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and Auschwitz filled the camp, along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.
Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts or being shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure or were put to death in a gas chamber.
