95-Year-Old Woman Indicted On 10,000 Counts Of Accessory To Murder In Nazi Camp

A 95-year-old woman has been indicted in Germany on 10,000 counts of being an accessory to murder, as well as complicity in attempted murders at a Nazi camp.

The woman, identified as Irmgard F. under German privacy laws, worked as a secretary for the camp commander at the Stutthof Nazi camp, a concentration camp located an approximate 20 miles from the Polish city of Gdansk.

This indictment follows a five-year investigation into this case. As F. was under the age of 21 at the time of the offenses she stands accused of, it’s reported that she will be tried in a juvenile court, where she will probably be handed a milder sentence.

The woman worked as a secretary at the camp between June 1943 and April 1945.

The case will now hinge on whether or not F. played a role in the atrocities perpetrated by the camp guards. Peter Müller-Rakow, from the public prosecutor’s offices in Itzehoe, north of Hamburg, said, ‘It’s about the concrete responsibility she had in the daily functioning of the camp… It’s a highly complicated case.’

F. has reportedly admitted that she had been aware of some of the killings of inmates, with many items of camp correspondence and files having crossed her desk. However she has maintained that she had been unaware of large numbers of inmates being killed by gas at the time of her employment.

She has also asserted that the window of her office pointed away from the camp, meaning she had not been able to see what was really going on.

Rachel Century, a British historian who wrote a book on female administrators in the Third Reich, told The New York Times: ‘It’s fair to say that the majority of these women knew about the persecution of the Jews and some of them knew about them being murdered. But some secretaries had roles that gave them more access to information than others.’

It’s believed more than 60,000 people either died or were killed at Stutthof, which was the first Nazi concentration camp to be established beyond Germany’s borders.