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A 96-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary who absconded before her trial was set to begin is due to appear in court in Germany on Tuesday.
The first woman to be prosecuted for Nazi-era crimes in decades, Irmgard Furchner is charged with complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.
However an arrest warrant was issued by the court in the northern town of Itzehoe after Furchner left the retirement home where she lives on September 30, as her trial was set to begin, and headed to a metro station.
The pensioner managed to evade police for several hours before being apprehended in the nearby city of Hamburg and temporarily held in custody by authorities.
Furchner was released five days later “under the condition of precautionary measures”, said court spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer, adding that it was “assured that she (Furchner) will appear at the next appointment”.
According to media reports, the accused has been fitted with an electronic tag to monitor her whereabouts.
Camp secretary
Between June 1943 and April 1945, the accused worked in the office of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe. Prosecutors say she took dictation of the SS officer’s orders and handled his correspondence.
Roughly 65,000 people died at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk, among them “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war”, according to the indictment.
A teenager at the time the alleged crimes were committed, Furchner’s trial is being held in juvenile court.
In a letter sent ahead of her first scheduled hearing, the defendant told the presiding judge of the court that she did not want to appear in person in the dock.
Her ultimate failure to present herself showed “contempt for the survivors and also for the rule of law”, the vice president of the…
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Source : france24
