A 96-year-old German woman who ran away on Thursday before her court trial on charges of aiding and abetting murder in Nazi concentration camps was recaptured by authorities.
The woman, who was allegedly a secretary for the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, left her home in a taxi on Thursday and headed for a subway station on the outskirts of Hamburg to an unknown destination, Itzehoe state court spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer said, according to German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur. The secretary was named as Irmgard Furchner by Reuters.
“The woman has been located by German police,” Milhoffer told CNN. “Local authorities are now assessing whether she is able to serve a prison sentence.”
IN RARE CASE INVOLVING FEMALE NAZI, 95-YEAR-OLD CHARGED FOR HOLOCAUST-RELATED CRIMES
Approximately 65,000 inmates are estimated to have died at the Stutthof camp, according to German data. A court indictment for Furchner said she is “suspected of having aided and abetted 11,387 cases of murder.”
“The accused is charged with having assisted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of inmates there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office of the former concentration camp Stutthof,” the court said in a pretrial statement.
Furchner will stand trial before a juvenile court chamber because she was an adolescent at the time of the alleged offense.
The defendant’s lawyer is aware that a charge of aiding and abetting murder from a desk could be upheld, according to a recent interview with Der Spiegel.
“It will depend on whether knowledge of the characteristics of murder, cruelty, or malice exists,” her lawyer, Wolf Molkentin, said. “Otherwise, there would only be an aid to manslaughter, which would then be statute-barred,” meaning the case would be dismissed due to surpassing the statute of limitations.
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Furchner’s case comes just one week before a trial against a 100-year-old SS guard at a former Nazi concentration camp is slated to begin.
