Former concentration camp secretary is silent: "Do not deny the Shoah"

More than 76 years after the end of the Nazi regime, a former concentration camp secretary is on trial in Schleswig-Holstein.

At the start of the trial, the 96-year-old went into hiding, and now she silently hears a monstrous charge.

Proof of guilt could be difficult.

Itzehoe - Actually, the former secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp did not want to face the trial before the Itzehoe regional court. But 19 days after her failed attempt to escape, around 50 journalists and spectators, several judicial officers and 13 accessory prosecutors await the 96-year-old in the courtroom. With only a little delay, employees of the forensic medical service push the former concentration camp secretary into the room in a wheelchair. A white headscarf with a blue and red flower pattern, an FFP2 mask and sunglasses hide her face.

After the photographers have left the room, a doctor removes the defendant's headscarf. She looks much younger than 96, wears her gray hair as a perm and looks attentively in the direction of the court through normal glasses. "Yeah," she said when the presiding judge Dominik Groß asked whether she could understand him. Then she confirms her personal details.

The indictment accuses Irmgard F. of complicity in the murder of 11,380 people and complicity in the attempted murder of a further seven prisoners. She worked from June 1, 1943 to April 1, 1945 in the headquarters of the German concentration camp Stutthof near Danzig. As a stenographer and typist, she helped those in charge of the camp with the systematic killing of prisoners, explains prosecutor Maxi Wantzen. As a civilian employee in the service of the SS-Totenkopfverband, she recorded, sorted or drafted all the letters from the camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe at the time. As a result, she was aware of all the events in the camp and of the types of killings in every detail. At the time of the crime, the woman was 18 to 19 years old. That is why the process takes place in front of a youth chamber.

Wantzen describes how around 300 prisoners were individually murdered in a shot in the neck disguised as a sickroom. Several times 25 to 35 women, mostly anti-Semitic persecuted, were herded into the gas chamber of the camp. When resistance to the murders at this location increased among the prisoners, the SS continued the gassing with Zyklon B in a converted small railroad car. As of November 1944, at least 10,000 prisoners died of typhus. Those in charge of the camp consciously did not do anything about the dying. Prisoners should have burned the bodies in the crematorium and on a stake.

The defendant listens carefully to the allegations.

But she is silent.

At this point in time, his client will not comment or answer any questions, says her defense lawyer Wolf Molkentin.

Then he makes it clear that there is no doubt about the main acts, i.e. the cruel and insidious murders in Stutthof.

His client distanced herself from the mobilization for her "in certain circles".

She is not a Holocaust denier.

"She does not deny the crimes of the Shoah, not even the horrific acts that have just been brought before all of us by reading out the indictment," explains Molkentin.

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His client only countered the accusation that she had personally incurred a criminal debt. Indeed, it is difficult to understand why she was questioned four times decades ago and is now in the dock herself. Your former superior, Hoppe, was only convicted of aiding and abetting murder, the defense attorney noted. Apparently no document was found from Stutthof bearing her abbreviated name. It is also not certain that his client was really well informed about the murder. Molkentin reads out a notorious quote from SS chief Heinrich Himmler, in which he praises the mass murder of the Jews as a "glorious sheet of glory in our history that can never be written". The SS men would never talk about it, Himmler declared in 1943.Then why should they have done it with a young civil servant in the camp headquarters? Asks the defense attorney.

The process is to be continued on October 26th with the hearing of the historical expert Stefan Hördler.

dpa