Irmgard Furchner, 96, was found and remanded in custody after several hours on the run.
Former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp, she tried to escape the opening of her trial by leaving her retirement home to take a taxi to the outskirts of Hamburg.
During the day, the court in Itzehoe, in northern Germany, had to communicate about this unusual hit-and-run:
“I can inform you that the accused has been found, she will be brought to court, and a doctor will establish her fitness for detention” Court spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer explained, adding: “the main hearing will continue on October 19 and the reading of the indictment is now scheduled for that date. “
Given his age, the court had not seen fit to take Irmgard Furchner’s warning seriously. According to information from Der Spiegel magazine, partly confirmed by a lawyer for Holocaust victims, she had let it be known by mail three weeks ago that she would boycott her trial, judging it “degrading”.
His behavior caused consternation. “It shows contempt for survivors and the rule of law”, lamented Christoph Heubner, the vice-president of the Auschwitz Committee.
“Even if this woman is very old, could the court not have taken precautions?”, He also noted, wondering also about the complicity from which she was able to benefit.
“Sufficiently healthy to flee, sufficiently healthy to go to prison!”, For his part tweeted Efraim Zuroff, the president of the Simon Wiesenthal Center who is hunting down the Nazis still alive.
She is accused of having participated through her administrative duties in the murder of 10,000 detainees in the Stutthof concentration camp, located in present-day Poland. She worked there as a typist and secretary to the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, between June 1943 and April 1945.
In this camp near the city of Gdansk (Danzig at the time) where 65,000 people perished, “Jewish detainees, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war” were systematically murdered, recalled the prosecution.
Some 4,000 women were guards in the concentration camps, according to several historians.
Never before had Germany brought such old Nazis to justice.
A centenarian, former guardian of the Sachsenhausen Nazi camp, is also to be tried from next Thursday, near Berlin.
Reference-feedproxy.google.com