The Stutthof concentration camp

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July 16, 2021A former secretary of the administration of the Nazi concentration camp of Stutthof, will go to trial in Germany for complicity in the extermination of over 11 thousand people.



The woman, now 96 years old, will be tried before a juvenile court, because at the time of the facts she was 18-19 years old. The trial will open on September 30, a spokeswoman for the regional court in Itzehoe, the city in the northern region of Schleswig Holstein where the proceedings will take place, said.



"The defendant is accused of having assisted those who ran the camp in the systematic killing of prisoners between June 1943 and April 1945 in

her functions as a stenographer and typist

in the office of the commander of the former Stutthof concentration camp ", explained the spokeswoman.



The elderly defendant,

Irmgard F.

was the secretary of

Paul Werner Hoppe

, head of the concentration camp in Stutthof, near Gdansk, in Poland at the time Nazi-occupied Stutthof was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazis outside Germany and the last to be liberated by Russian forces in May 1945.



According to the German broadcaster Ard, the woman has been heard as a witness several times in the past because the correspondence with the economic leaders of the SS passed from her desk. Irmgard F. had admitted that every day she took note of what Hoppe dictated to her, but she always maintained that she was unaware of the massacres that took place a few meters from her office. The case against him was opened in 2016 and uses testimonies from the United States and Israel.



In July 2020, a juvenile court in Hamburg found a 93-year-old man who had been the guardian of the Stutthof concentration camp as a boy guilty of complicity in murder. The man was sentenced to two years in prison, with suspended sentence.



It is from the 2011 trial against

John Demjanjuk

that German jurisprudence believes that being employed by the Nazis in a concentration camp can prove complicity in the death of innocent inmates. Here is explained the opening of several new processes.