Prosecutors in Germany have charged the elderly secretary of the former Stutthof SS commander with accessory to the deaths of 10,000 people, HuffPost reported on Saturday.
The 95-year-old will be tried in a juvenile court because she was under 21 years old at the time, the public prosecutor's office in the small town of Itzehoe, Hamburg said. She is believed to be in good enough physical condition to stand trial, the prosecutors said.
The woman also faces an unspecified number of charges of attempted murder for her role in the camp between June 1943 and April 1945, Peter Mueller-Rakow, spokesperson for the prosecutors, said Friday. She has been under investigation since 2016, media reports said.
The accused has not been identified under German privacy laws but has been partially named by local journalists as Irmgard F, a German pensioner residing in an elderly care home in Pinneberg, Hamburg.
The woman is accused of having "assisted those responsible at the camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war in her function as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander," the prosecutors said in a statement quoted by The Guardian.
Irmgard F confirmed to NDR, Germany's state broadcaster, that she had worked as secretary to SS Officer Paul Werner Hoppe in Stutthof but said she never set foot in the camp and had no knowledge of the killings taking place there.
It is estimated that around 65,000 people were brutally killed in the Stutthof concentration camp during the Holocaust. The prisoners were murdered by way of lethal injections of gasoline directly to their hearts, shooting, or food deprivation. The camp was built in 1939 along Poland's Baltic coast east of Gdansk.
Others who have been taken as prisoners in the camp included politicians, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and members of the religious group Jehovah's Witnesses.
Hoppe was himself tried in court and convicted for being an accessory to the killings and given a nine-year jail term in 1957. He died in 1974.
It is not the first time a woman has been charged for the genocide of World War II. The decision to carry out charges against a former staff is the latest in a string of recent attempts to broaden prosecutions beyond those directly involved in the murders of war prisoners.
German prosecutors are looking into dozen more cases against former Nazi or SS personnel who worked at the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, Buchenwald, or Mauthausen, state broadcaster ARD said.
