The former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp Irmgard F. has appealed Thursday the sentence handed down by the German judiciary a week ago in which she was found guilty of the crime of accessory to the murder of more than 10,000 people.
It will now be up to the Federal Court of Justice, Germany’s highest judicial body, to examine whether there has indeed been an error in the proceedings against the defendant, for whom the two-year prison sentence handed down against her was nevertheless held in abeyance.
«The verdict is not legally final,» said sources at the court of first instance in the northern German town of Itzehoe, which handed down the conviction on December 20, 2009.
Irmgard F. – identified only by first name and last initial under German privacy laws – worked as an officer at the Stutthof camp commandant near the Polish city of Gdansk from June 1943 to April 1945. At that time she was between 18 and 19 years old.
The trial began in September 2021 and several camp survivors gave accounts of the abuses committed inside the camp. Experts also spoke, including a historian who spoke for 14 sessions.
The defendant tried to evade prosecution by escaping early one morning from her nursing home in a town outside Hamburg in the north of the country. Police arrested her within hours and a court ordered her to spend five days in custody.
Irmgard F. was found guilty of having assisted those responsible for the concentration camp in the systematic murder of inmates. Because she was only 18 years old at the time, the trial was held before a juvenile court in Itzehoe.
The Wiesenthal Center, known for its search for fugitive Nazi criminals, has criticized the appeal filed by Irmgard F., a move it called «an insult to the memory of those who died in Stutthof».
The appeal is «totally unjustified and unjust», said the director of the Wiesenthal Center in Israel, Efraim Zuroff, who considers that the acquittal would be tantamount to «erasing the memory of the crimes he helped commit and the memory of those who perished».
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
