A woman who worked as a secretary for the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp has been charged for her role in mass murder during the holocaust.
The woman, who BBC identifies as Irmgard F, worked in the camp Stutthof, where an estimated 65,000 people were murdered during WWII. Prosecutors are now charging her in connection with “aiding and abetting murder in more than 10,000 cases.”
Stutthof was known as a particularly brutal camp, first established in 1939 and existing until Soviet troops freed prisoners in May 1945. People in the Polish-occupied camp, many of whom were Jewish as well as some non-Jewish Poles, died of starvation, disease, were gassed, or given lethal injections. About 100,000 people were incarcerated at this camp at the time.
Irmgard’s case is unique, since very few women have been tried for their role in the Nazi horrors of WWII. Her position as a secretary is still being studied, but since she was under 21 at the time of the crimes, she is being tried as a minor. The juvenile court must now decide whether or not the 95-year-old will face trial.
The indictment states that she “assisted those responsible at the camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war, in her function as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commandant” between June 1943 and April 1945.
The woman has reportedly claimed that she didn’t know people were being gassed during her time at the camp.
According to CNN, German prosecutors are also investigating 13 other cases connected to WWII concentration camps. Last year a former Stutthof guard named Bruno Dey, who is now 93, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for his complicity in mass murder.
