[News] Nazi Stutthof camp secretary flees as German trial starts

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A former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been captured after trying to flee before her trial in northern Germany.Irmgard Furchner, 96, was due to stand trial for complicity in 11,000 murders, but she failed to turn up and the judge issued a warrant for her arrest.The defendant was detained by police hours after disappearing from a nursing home in the town of Quickborn. She had fled to Hamburg where she was reportedly seen on a local street Irmgard Furchner had been due to appear at a special juvenile court in Itzehoe, an hour's drive north of Hamburg. Instead she went to an underground station and travelled to the outskirts of Hamburg."She took a taxi," said court spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer. The court spokeswoman said later she would now be brought before the court in Itzehoe, German reports said Judge Dominik Gross had earlier revealed that Irmgard Furchner was a fugitive and postponed the case until 19 OctoberA group representing Nazi survivors and relatives of the dead expressed outrage that she had been able to escape. "It shows incredible contempt for the rule of law and survivors," said the International Auschwitz Committee.

 

 

The case is seen as unprecedented as Irmgard Furchner was a civilian worker at Stutthof.Holocaust guard found unfit to stand trial at 96She had worked as a typist in the office of Stutthof camp commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe, near the modern-day Polish city of Gdansk, which was then occupied by Nazi Germany and known as Danzig.For two years before the end of the war in 1945, she was said to have known key details of what went on at the concentration camp.During Hoppe's 1954 trial she revealed how he had dictated messages to her but claimed she knew nothing of the Nazi murders at Stutthof.Some 100,000 people were held at Stutthof, which was notorious for atrocious conditions and 65,000 are estimated to have died.Stutthof had gas chambers, and people were killed at the camp by gassing, shooting and lethal injection as well as death and starvation. More lost their lives on death marches from the camp as World War Two neared its end.Those killed at Stutthof include many Jews as well as non-Jewish Poles and captured Soviet soldiers. Thursday's case marks one of the last ever Nazi trials, largely because few defendants are still alive. The trial is taking place in a juvenile court as the defendant was under the adult age at the time. In March, a former Stutthof camp guard was declared unfit to stand trial, while last year another camp guard, Bruno Dey, was found guilty of complicity in the murder of more than 5,000 prisoners. He was given a suspended jail term.

Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58747082