96-year-old former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp escapes before her trial: “She took a taxi and left”

A former secretary of a concentration camp nazi, 96, went on the run before the opening this Thursday in Germany of her trial, in which she was to be tried for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people.

“The defendant fled (…) and an arrest warrant has been issued”, announced the president of the court, 20 minutes after the scheduled time for the start of the trial in the city of Itzehoe, in northern Germany.

“He left his (senior) home this morning. I take a taxi”, said a court spokeswoman, Frederike Milhoffer.

His attorney, Wolf Molkentin, was present in the courtroom, but did not make a statement.

Irmgard Furchner, who at the time of the crimes charged was between 18 and 19 years old, She was to be the first woman involved in Nazism to be tried in the country for decades.

This trial was to precede that of a centennial, a former guard of the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, which will begin in a week.

Up to now Germany, who for a long time was lazy to find his war criminals, He had never tried such elderly ex-Nazis.

It was also to be carried out on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the death sentence by hanging in Nuremberg of 12 of the main leaders of the Third Reich.

The prosecution accuses the nonagenarian of having participated in the murder of detainees in the Stutthof concentration camp, in present-day Poland, where she worked as a typist and secretary to the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, between June 1943 and April 1945.

Some 65,000 people died in the camp near the city of Gdansk, including “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war,” according to the prosecution.

Execution orders

The lawyer Christoph Rückel, who has represented the survivors of the Shoah for years, assures that “she handled all the correspondence of the camp commander.”

“He also typed the execution and deportation orders and put his initials,” assured the public regional chain NDR.

After a lengthy procedure, the court ruled in February that the nonagenarian was fit to appear despite her advanced age. But court hearings should be limited to a few hours a day.

Seventy-six years after the end of World War II, German justice is still searching for ex-Nazi criminals still alive.

Different German prosecutors are currently examining eight cases involving in particular former employees from the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück camps, the Central Office for the Clarification of National Socialist Crimes told AFP.

Death of suspects

In recent years, several processes had to be abandoned due to the death of the suspects or their physical inability to appear in court.

But while Germany has sentenced four former guards or employees of the Nazi camps at Sobibor, Auschwitz and Stutthof in the last ten years, it has tried very few women involved in the Nazi machine, according to historians.

The justice has analyzed the cases of at least three other Nazi camp employees, especially another secretary who worked in Stutthof, but this one died last year before the process ended.

The Neuruppin prosecutor’s office near Berlin is currently examining the case of another woman employed in the Ravensbrück camp, according to the Ludwigsbourg-based head office.

Some 4,000 women worked as guards in the concentration camps, according to historians, but few were tried after the war.

Among those who answered for crimes committed during the Third Reich is the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp guard Maria Mandl, nicknamed “the ferocious beast”, who was hanged in 1948 after being sentenced to death by a Krakow court.

Between 1946 and 1948, in Hamburg, 38 people, including 21 women, appeared before British military judges for having worked in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, especially reserved for women.

The jurisprudence that led to the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard from the Sobibor camp in 1943, to five years in prison, now allows any concentration camp auxiliary to be prosecuted for complicity in tens of thousands of murders, from a guard to an accountant.

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