The survivors and their lawyers repeatedly asked the accused to speak.

Had asked for words of regret at the unimaginable horror.

Had referred to the historical importance of this trial, which may be the last of its kind, and called on the defendant to use the time she has left.

So that everyone else understood the unimaginable.

But the defendant remained silent.

Julian Staib

Political correspondent for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland based in Wiesbaden.

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Only at the very end of this long process, after her defense attorney had made his plea, did she briefly comment: "I'm sorry about everything that happened," said 97-year-old Irmgard F. in a quiet but clear voice on Tuesday the district court of Itzehoe.

“I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time.

I can not say more."

Irmgard F. was secretary to the camp commander in the German concentration camp Stutthof in occupied Poland, not far from Danzig.

The National Socialists murdered around six million Jews in Germany and in the occupied countries.

Around 65,000 people were murdered in Stutthof

Stutthof was not one of the really big concentration camps, but it wasn't a small one either.

There alone around 65,000 people were murdered by the Germans.

They were gassed, starved, burned.

As a civilian employee, F. is said to have been part of the National Socialists' huge killing machine and to have assisted in more than 11,000 insidious and cruel murders, according to the indictment.

The horror of the trial was meticulously described: the gassings, the shots in the neck and death marches, the inhuman prison conditions.

Irmgard F. was silent.

Maybe out of shame, maybe out of defiance.

She did not appear on the first day of the hearing, instead fleeing the retirement home by taxi, whereupon she was briefly held in custody.

You carry no personal guilt, let them know through their defense attorney.

Across from her in the courtroom sat several rows of attorneys representing joint plaintiffs.

Those people who often only escaped the murders with unimaginable luck and an iron will and who are now often full of guilt themselves: why were they allowed to survive while their loved ones had to go to the gas chambers?

No reaction

The witness Josef Salomonovic, for example, lost his father in Stutthof.

A concentration camp doctor is said to have put a lethal injection in his heart.

Salomonovic was six years old at the time.

He survived eight concentration camps as a child.

That in Stutthof was the worst for him, he said in court.

He held a photo of his father there in the direction of the defendants.

But she showed no reaction.

Other witnesses reported - also via video - about the collection of human bones in the crematorium, about the executions and the many starved fellow prisoners, about the burning of the dead in the pits and the permanent stench of burned corpses.

After a short initial phase in the Federal Republic of Germany, there were hardly any trials against Nazi criminals for far too long and the vast majority of perpetrators got away with them (around 3,000 SS people are said to have worked in Stutthof alone), the verdict changed against the earlier one Sobibor Warden John Demjanjuk prosecution in 2011.

Since then, investigations have also been carried out into ordinary employees of concentration camps.

Late prosecution

There were therefore a number of late trials against very old people, including those against the former “accountant of Auschwitz”, Oskar Gröning, but also against a former guard at the Stutthof concentration camp, who was sentenced to two years’ probation in Hamburg in 2020.

Gröning never had to begin his imprisonment, Demjanjuk died before the verdict became final.

At times it seems as if the judiciary is trying to make up for decades of misconduct with a multitude of new trials.

But prosecution comes late;

Most of the perpetrators and eyewitnesses from back then have long since passed away, and many others are no longer able to be questioned.