Germany: 96-year-old former secretary of a concentration camp on the run before trial

She was due to appear in court from Thursday, September 30, the only woman involved in Nazism to be tried for decades in Germany. But the 96-year-old former secretary of a concentration camp fled the day her trial opened. “The accused is on the run (…) an arrest warrant has been issued ”, announced the president of the court of Itzehoe, in the north of Germany, where she is to be tried for “complicity in murder in more than ten thousand cases”, according to the parquet.

“She left her home [pour personnes âgées près de Hambourg] this morning. She took a taxi “, said Frederike Milhoffer, a spokesperson for the Itzehoe court. His lawyer, Wolf Molkentin, was however present in the courtroom, but he made no statement to reporters. The president of the special youth court asked ” a bit of patience “ while the opening of the trial seemed compromised. Because even if the accused is arrested, a medical examination will still have to be carried out to determine if the nonagenarian is able to follow a hearing.

The prosecution accuses Irmgard Furchner, aged 18 to 19 at the material time, of having participated in the murder of detainees in the Stutthof concentration camp in present-day Poland, where she worked as a typist and secretary of the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, between June 1943 and April 1945.

“Execution and deportation orders”

In this camp near the city of Gdansk where 65,000 people died, “Jewish detainees, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war” were systematically murdered, according to the prosecution. According to lawyer Christoph Rückel, who has represented Holocaust survivors for years, “She kept all the correspondence of the camp commander”. “She also typed the execution and deportation orders and put her initials”, he assured on the regional public channel NDR.

At the end of a long procedure, justice had estimated in February that the nonagenarian was fit to appear despite her great age. Seventy-six years after the end of the Second World War, German justice continues to search for former Nazi criminals who are still alive. Eight cases involving former employees of the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück camps in particular, are currently being examined by various German prosecutors, said the Central Office for the Elucidation of the Crimes of National Socialism.

This trial, if it finally opens, should be followed by that, a week later, of a centenarian, a former guard of the Nazi camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. Never before has Germany, which has long shown little eagerness to find its war criminals, tried such elderly former Nazis. The case is also examined on the eve of 75^e anniversary of the death sentences by hanging by the Nuremberg Tribunal of twelve of the main leaders of the III^e Reich.

Some 4,000 women served as guards

In recent years, several cases have had to be abandoned due to the death of the suspects or their physical inability to be brought to trial. But while Germany has condemned in the past decade four former guards or accountants of the Nazi camps of Sobibor, Auschwitz and Stutthof, it has judged very few women involved in the Nazi machinery, according to historians.

Justice has looked into the cases of at least three other women employed in Nazi camps, including another secretary who worked at Stutthof but she died last year before the proceedings were concluded. The Neuruppin prosecutor’s office near Berlin is currently examining the case of another woman employed in the Ravensbrück camp, according to the Ludwigsburg-based Central Office.

Some 4,000 women have served as guards in concentration camps, according to historians. But few were tried after the war. Among those who responded to the atrocities committed under III^e Reich, the warden of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp Maria Mandl, nicknamed “The Ferocious Beast”, was hanged in 1948 after her death sentence by a court in Krakow.

Between 1946 and 1948, in Hamburg, 38 people including 21 women appeared before British military judges for having officiated at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, specially reserved for women. The jurisprudence of the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard of the Sobibor camp in 1943, to five years in prison, now makes it possible to prosecute for complicity in tens of thousands of assassinations any auxiliary of a camp of concentration, from guard to accountant.