A German court has convicted a 97-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary as an accomplice in the murder of more than 10,000 people, but is holding her two-year prison sentence in abeyance.
The Itzehoe Regional Court found Irmgard F., who worked as a civil servant in the commandant’s office at the Stutthof camp near the Polish city of Gdansk from June 1943 to April 1945, to be a proven accomplice. At the 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 elderly woman 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.
«I am sorry for what happened,» she declared at the end of the trial, the only time she broke her silence. «I’m sorry I was in Stutthof at that time. That’s all I can say,» he pleaded.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
