As of today, a former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp should be on trial in Itzehoe. But the trial has to be adjourned, the defendant 96-year-old did not appear at the trial. After her escape, she has now been caught.
The possibly last trial for crimes of the Nazi era in Germany has turned into a tangible scandal. The trial against a former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp was supposed to begin this Thursday before the Itzehoe regional court. The woman should have been tried in more than 11,000 cases in court since late morning for complicity in murder.
However, a good quarter of an hour after the planned start of the trial, the court in the small town in Schleswig-Holstein declared that the 96-year-old defendant was fugitive, given the state of affairs. The criminal chamber had issued an arrest warrant, said the presiding judge at the regional court, Dominik Groß. In the early afternoon it was finally announced that the woman had been arrested. The police bring the 96-year-old to the court, said a spokeswoman for the Itzeho regional court.
Outrage among concentration camp survivors and their relatives
Because the accused had escaped, the hearing was adjourned to October 19. “It is well known that the main hearing will not take place against a defendant who has not been charged,” said Judge Gross. The court of course assumes that the defendant will be there at the next appointment. “Somehow we’ll work it out.”
The International Auschwitz Committee expressed outrage at the defendants’ flight. “This shows an incredible contempt for the rule of law and also for the survivors,” said Vice-Executive President Christoph Heubner. The committee represents concentration camp survivors and their relatives.
Irmgard F. worked from June 1943 to April 1945 in the command office of the German concentration camp Stutthof near Danzig. As a stenographer and typist, she is charged with helping those responsible at the camp with the systematic killing of prisoners. An expert opinion commissioned by the court came to the conclusion in June that the very old woman is fit to stand trial.
In Germany there have recently been several trials against former members of the Nazi camp teams. According to the central office responsible for investigating Nazi crimes in Ludwigsburg, around 65,000 people, including many Jews, died in the Stutthof concentration camp and its sub-camps, as well as on the so-called death marches at the end of the war. The camp gained notoriety for the catastrophic supply of the inmates, which the SS consciously accepted, and who mainly died of exhaustion and illness.
People were murdered in the Stutthof concentration camp – or they died of want
In July 2020, the Hamburg Regional Court sentenced a former security guard in Stutthof to two years probation. The court found the 93-year-old guilty of complicity in murder in 5230 cases – at least as many prisoners were, according to the criminal chamber, murdered during the defendant’s service in 1944/45 in Stutthof.
Most of the victims died as a result of the hostile conditions in the so-called Jewish camp of Stutthof. At least 200 were killed in the gas chamber and a locked train car with Zyklon B. 30 were killed in a secret shot in the neck in the camp’s crematorium. “You watched this death then and guarded it,” said the presiding judge Anne Meier-Göring in the grounds of the judgment.
According to his own statements, the defendant Bruno D. had served with a rifle on the watchtowers. His defense lawyer Wolf Molkentin told the magazine “Spiegel” that aiding and abetting thousands of murders could also be done from a desk. In the case of a typist, however, the bar for criminal liability could be raised. “In the present case, it will also depend on whether there was knowledge of the characteristics of the murder, cruelty or insidiousness. Otherwise there would only be an aid to manslaughter, which would then be statute-barred.”
Trial in front of a youth chamber in Itzehoe
Like the trial against D., the trial against F. should also take place in a youth chamber because the defendant was only 18 or 19 years old at the time of the offense. For the first day of the trial, only the prosecution was planned to be read out. The criminal chamber had originally scheduled 26 further trial dates until the beginning of June next year. It is not yet known whether the proceedings will drag on into the coming summer.
See a video from our archive from the summer of 2020: Anyone who stood as an SS man on the watchtower of a concentration camp is guilty of aiding and abetting murder. This is what the Hamburg Regional Court ruled 75 years after the end of Nazi rule.
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