German prosecutors have filed charges against a 95-year-old woman who is said to have contributed to the “systematic killing of Jewish prisoners,” along with Polish partisans 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, has been charged with 10,000 counts of murder accessories and an unspecified number of counts of attempted murder.
In turn, 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 Poland’s Baltic coast, 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 was said to have been 18 or 19 when she began working in the Nazi camp in June 1943. She was a close associate of the SS commander there until April 1945. The camp was one that used Zyklon B gas chambers to exterminate prisoners. More than 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 had repeatedly testified to authorities about what she saw and did in the Stutthof camp. She claimed she was unaware of mass poisonings or other acts of genocide – in part because the window of her office was facing the outside of the camp, NPR reported. She said she never set foot in the camp, 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 an interview, Irmgard F said he testified at his trial that all of Hoppe’s correspondence with the higher SS administration passed through her office and that the commander dictated her letters daily, the AP reported. She said she did not know about the prisoners who were gassed, but told authorities at the time that she was aware that Hoppe had ordered executions, which she assumed were punishable by crime.
Last year, 93-year-old Bruno Dey, a former guard at Stutthof Camp, was convicted of being an accessory to the killing of more than 5,200 detainees – but was sentenced to two years in prison with a suspended sentence. Among the witnesses to his trial was then 91-year-old Asia Shindelman, who survived the camp and eventually settled in Wayne, NJ.