Two MPs stand next to an empty seat of the accused in the courtroom, ahead of the trial against the 96-year-old former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp’s SS commander in court in Itzeho, Germany, on Thursday.
A former secretary of the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp was being sought on Thursday on an arrest warrant for murder in Germany after abandoning the planned start of his trial in more than 11,000 counts, officials said.
German news agency DPA quoted Itzeho State Court spokeswoman Friedrich Milhofer as saying that the 96-year-old woman left the house where she lives on Thursday morning in a taxi, on her way to a metro station on the outskirts of Hamburg. His destination was not known.
Presiding Judge Dominic Gross said the court has issued an arrest warrant and it remains to be seen whether he will be caught.
Prosecutors argue that the woman was part of the mechanism that helped keep the Nazi camp functioning 75 years earlier during World War II.
The court, in a statement before the trial, said that the defendant allegedly “as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office assisted the people in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945, and provoked them.”
Despite her age, the German woman was to be tried in juvenile court because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes. German media identified him as Irmgaard Fürchner.
Prominent Nazi hunter Ephraim Zuroff at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Jerusalem said the defendant had claimed in a recent letter to the court that she was too weak to appear for trial.
“Obviously that’s not the case at all,” he said.
“If he’s healthy enough to escape, he’s healthy enough to live in captivity,” Zuroff told the Associated Press. His flight, he said, “should also affect the sentence.”
The case against Furchner builds on German legal precedent established in cases over the past decade that anyone who assisted in the functioning of Nazi death camps and concentration camps was committed there, without evidence of involvement in a specific crime. Can be prosecuted as an accomplice to murders.
A defense lawyer told Der Spiegel magazine that the trial would focus on whether the 96-year-old was aware of the atrocities at the camp.
“My client worked among SS men who were experienced in violence – however, does this mean that they shared their position of knowledge? It is not necessarily clear,” said lawyer Wolf Molkentin.
According to other media reports, Fürchner was interrogated as a witness during previous Nazi trials and said at the time that Stautthof’s former SS commandant, Paul Werner Höppe, had directed him daily letters and radio messages.
The DPA said Furchner testified that she was not aware of the murders at the camp while she was working there.
Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig – now the Polish city of Gdansk – Stuthof was used from about 1940 as a so-called “work education camp”, where forced labourers, the main Usually Polish and Soviet citizens were sent. To serve sentences and often die.
From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and Auschwitz filled the camp, as well as thousands of Polish citizens swept away by the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
Others in prison included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There more than 60,000 people were killed by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly into their hearts, or by being shot or starving. Others were forced to go outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure, or were put to death in gas chambers.
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