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BERLIN – A 96-year-old German woman who was arrested shortly after fleeing before a court hearing last month on charges of committing war crimes during World War II appeared before a judge Tuesday in the northern city of Itzehoe.
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Irmgard Furchner, accused of having contributed when she was 18 to the murder of 11,412 people when she was a typist in the Stutthof concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, was wheeled into the courtroom.
His face was barely visible behind a white mask and a scarf that covered his eyes. Security was intense as the judge and legal staff addressed the court.
Between 1939 and 1945, some 65,000 people died of hunger and disease or in the gas chamber of the concentration camp near Gdansk, in present-day Poland. Among them were prisoners of war and Jews caught up in the Nazi extermination campaign.
The trial was postponed after Furchner left her home early on September 30 and ran away for several hours before being taken into custody that same day.
The charges could not be read until Furchner, who is facing trial in adolescent court due to his young age at the time of the alleged crimes, was present in court.
She is the latest nonagenarian to be charged with Holocaust crimes in what prosecutors see as a rush to seize the last chance to bring justice to the victims of some of the worst mass killings in history.
Although prosecutors convicted the main perpetrators, those who issued orders or activated the trigger, in the “Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt” of the 1960s, the practice until the 2000s was to leave lower-ranking suspects alone. .
Reference-torontosun.com