The Itzehoe district court found the former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp guilty.

The 97-year-old Irmgard F. was sentenced to a youth sentence of two years on probation for being an accessory to murder in more than 10,500 cases and for being an accessory to attempted murder in five cases.

The court thus largely followed the request of the public prosecutor. 

Julian Staib

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

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Irmgard F. was secretary to the camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe in the German concentration camp Stutthof near Gdansk.

F. was accused in Itzehoe before the juvenile chamber of the district court because she was 18 to 19 years old at the time of the crime.

Between June 1943 and April 1945 she had worked as a secretary in the headquarters building of the concentration camp and had written shorthand for Hoppe.

He had also been charged decades ago, but only served three and a half years in prison after the verdict became final.   

In the Stutthof concentration camp, thousands of people were brutally murdered, burned and starved.

According to the verdict, as a civilian employee, F. was part of the National Socialists' huge killing machine.  

F's defense attorneys had recently pleaded for acquittal, arguing that there was no proof of the crime and no meaningful evidence.

The taking of evidence in the proceedings before the regional court, which lasted more than 14 months, yielded little concrete information.

"Insurmountable doubts" remained.

The public prosecutor's office, however, had recently pleaded for a prison sentence of two years, which should be suspended on probation.

This was followed by many representatives of the accessory prosecution. 

Irmgard F., who lives in an old people's home in the Pinneberg district, was almost completely silent in court, only on the penultimate day of the hearing did she express her regret at "what has happened".

She added: "I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time.

I can not say more."  

The trial against F. could be one of the last of its kind.

Co-plaintiffs died during the trial, while others' memories became so faint that they no longer testified.

There are therefore hardly any comparable cases pending in the investigating authorities.