A 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has been found guilty of more than 10,500 cases of complicity to murder and given a two-year suspended sentence by a court in northern Germany.
Identified only as Irmgard F under German privacy rules, she maintained her silence through much of the trial, only saying towards the end: "I'm sorry for everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time. I can't say anything else."
Seventy-seven years after the end of World War II, Irmgard F's case is sure to be one of the last trials held in Germany dealing with the crimes of the Holocaust.
She worked as a civilian employee in the commandant's office of Stutthof near what was then the free city of Danzig, now Gdańsk, from June 1943 to April 1945, and therefore was found culpable for having assisted those in charge of the concentration camp in the systematic killing of inmates.
Because she was only 18 to 19 years old at the time of the crimes, the trial was before a juvenile court in Itzehoe, a small town north of Hamburg.
During the Holocaust, the German Nazi regime systematically murdered about 6 million Jews in Europe between 1941 and 1945 - a genocide that amounted to about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
The court's suspended sentence was in line with what the prosecution had requested. There were 15 legal representatives of the 31 joint plaintiffs who had joined the prosecution's suit, and they largely agreed with the state's sentencing request.
The defence had demanded acquittal.
"The defendant, who is her 98th year, has received her guilty verdict for aiding and abetting several thousand murders. State criminal law cannot do more in terms of the substance of the case," explained lawyer Hans-Jürgen Förster, who represented four Stutthof survivors as joint plaintiffs.
The trial began on September 30, 2021. During the 40 days of the hearing, the court heard eight of the 31 joint plaintiffs as witnesses. The survivors of the camp reported on the suffering and mass deaths in Stutthof.
The accused was pushed into the courtroom in a wheelchair.
The most important witness, however, was Stefan Hördler, an expert on the Nazi Germany's armed forces and its bureaucracy. He presented a report to the court over the course of 14 sessions. The defence had filed a motion for bias against him, which the court rejected.
Two judges in the case even visited the former Stutthof camp. During their visit, the judges wanted to clarify which areas of the camp the accused could see from her workplace at the time, among other questions.
Central to the trial was the issue of how much she could perceive of the crimes committed.
A trained typist, Irmgard F worked outside of the office of Stutthof concentration camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe. All orders were drawn up there, presiding judge Dominik Groß said.
"During her time at Stutthof, the defendant did not remain unaware of what was happening there," Groß said.
She had worked at the heart of the camp's administration and had trusting relationship with Hoppe, the judge said. Irmgard F had even accompanied Hoppe to the Wöbbelin concentration camp as the allies closed in in 1945.
From her office she was able to see the assembly point, where arriving prisoners often had to wait for days. The crematorium was in continuous operation in the fall of 1944. Smoke and stench spread throughout the camp. It was "simply beyond imagination" that the defendant had not noticed the mass killings, the judge said.
While Irmgard F "could have terminated her employment at any time," she chose not to, Groß said.
The court convicted her with aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people at Stutthof. At least 1,000 of them had been killed with the poison gas Zyklon B. Another 9,500 had died as a result of the cruel and inhumane conditions deliberately created by camp authorities.
The Arolsen Archives, an international documentation centre on Nazi persecution, says some 110,000 people from 28 countries were imprisoned at Stutthof and its 39 subcamps between 1939 and 1945. Almost 65,000 did not survive.
The defendant initially did not want to face the proceedings. On the first day of the trial, she disappeared early in the morning from her retirement home in the town of Quickborn.
Hours later, the police picked her up on a street in Hamburg. The court issued an arrest warrant. The then 96-year-old spent five days in custody.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jewish human rights organization, welcomed Tuesday's verdict, saying it was "the best that could be achieved" given that it was conducted in a juvenile court.
