Seventy-six years after the liberation of the Nazi camps, a 96-year-old former secretary of a concentration camp is on trial from Thursday in Germany, one of the last trials of former Nazis still alive.
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Highly symbolic, the case is being examined on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the death sentences by hanging by the Nuremberg Tribunal of 12 of the main leaders of the Third Reich.
This trial will also be followed by that, from October 7, of a centenarian, a former guard of the Nazi camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin.
She must answer for "complicity in murder"
At the material time, only 18 to 19 years old, the nonagenarian Irmgard Furchner, who lives in a residence for the elderly near Hamburg, will be tried by a special youth court.
Before the court in Itzehoe, in northern Germany, she must answer for "
complicity in murder in more than 10,000 cases
", according to the prosecution.
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The prosecution accuses her 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 to the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, between June 1943 and April 1945. In this camp near the city of Gdansk where 65,000 people perished, "
Jewish detainees, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war
" were systematically murdered, according to the prosecution.
She is also being prosecuted for "
complicity in attempted murders
".
Some 30 civil parties, a large majority of whom came from abroad, are expected during the hearings which should last at least until June 2022. Little information has circulated on the accused who did not speak so far on the facts with which he is accused.
But according to lawyer Christoph Rückel, who has represented Holocaust survivors for years, "
she kept all of the camp commander 's correspondence
."
"
She also typed the execution and deportation orders and affixed her initials,
" he said on the regional public channel NDR.
For her lawyer, Wolf Molkentin, she did not know the exact fate of the detainees.
“
My client would have worked in the midst of SS men experienced in violence.
But should she share their level of knowledge?
He asked in an interview with Spiegel.
"
In my opinion, this is not necessarily obvious,
" he added, insisting on the use of "
coded
"
terms
in the correspondence between officials of the Nazi death machine "
in such a way that a secretary could not necessarily decode them
”, according to him.
Few women prosecuted since the war
This trial, albeit late, is of particular interest because very few women involved in the horrors of the Nazis have been prosecuted since the end of the war.
“
In particular, the role of women in the Nazi regime and their involvement in the Holocaust have been ignored for too long by the courts,
” notes historian Simone Erpel in
Der Spiegel
.
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This procedure, like many others initiated in recent years, is not, however, free from controversy, with justice very suddenly calling old people to account that it had left alone since 1945. For decades, Germany has stood still. indeed shown in no hurry to find her war criminals.
Before the opening of Irmgard Furchner's trial, the press recalled that Adolf Hitler's private secretary, Traudl Junge, was never worried until his death in 2002. But the case law of the conviction in 2011 by John Demjanjuk, a guard at 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 concentration camp, from the guard to the accountant.
As controversial as this late justice is, it allows "
to give a voice to the victims, to their families, and to bring the facts back to the public consciousness
", according to the lawyer Andrej Umansky, author of a book on the Shoah in Soviet territory occupied by the Nazis.
In July 2020, the courts imposed a two-year suspended prison sentence on a former guard of the Stutthof camp, Bruno Dey, 93 years old.
In previous years, two former Auschwitz guards had already been sentenced.
They have since died.