German Court to Try 96-Year-Old Over Time at Nazi Concentration Camp

A 96-year-old former secretary at the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp will be tried at a north German juvenile court, accused of assisting in the systematic murder of thousands of people.

The regional Itzehoe court in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein said on Friday that the trial would provisionally start on Sept. 30.

It decided to try the woman for the crimes in the Juvenile Chamber because she was a teenager when she worked as a secretary at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II.

The woman, who worked as a civilian employee in the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp, is accused of aiding and abetting the murder of more than 11,000 people.

The indictment reads: “The defendant is charged with committing a crime as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office of the Stutthof former concentration camp between June 1943 and April 1945.”

It adds that she is alleged to have “assisted the camp commanders in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there.”

The defendant has already been questioned a number of times about the Holocaust as a witness, according to the ARDꞌs Taggesschau.

She testified in a 1954 court case that all correspondence with the SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt had passed over her desk. Commandant Paul Werner Hoppe dictated letters and radio messages to her every day.

She has denied knowing anything about the killings at the camp.

A medical expert has examined the defendant and deemed that she is capable of standing trial.

Stutthof was the last camp to be liberated by the allies in May 1945, just days before the end of the war. Many of its commanders and guards were hung for their crimes.

The site of the former Stutthof camp is now a museum.

The legal precedent that made it easier to try to bring elderly former Nazi concentration camp workers to justice in Germany was set by the John Demjanjuk trial, who was tried in Germany in 2011.

Nazi Germany captured Demjanjuk as a Ukrainian prisoner of war but he was later drafted in to work at the notorious Treblinka extermination camp.

Before that case, judges needed solid enough evidence of concrete personal involvement in a specific murder or murders before they could agree to hear a case. Now, demonstrating that an individual worked at a concentration camp and contributed to its more general systematic killing of inmates can suffice for a conviction. The legal change came too late to bring justice to many Nazi collaborators.

In July 2020, a 93-year-old man was found guilty at a juvenile court for being an SS guard at the camp and given a two-year suspended sentence.