44.2 F
New York
Friday, March 29, 2024

German Prosecutors Charge 95-Year-Old Woman with Complicity in 10,000 Murders of Jews & Others During WWII

Related Articles

-Advertisement-

Must read

Edited by: Fern Sidman

German prosecutors, on Friday filed charges against a 95-year-old woman they say was complicit in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof concentration camp during World War II, as was reported by NPR.

The woman, whose name was not released according to German privacy laws, worked as a typist and secretary at the Stutthof camp between June 1943 and April 1945 during World War II, according to a UPI report. NPR reported that despite her age, the case is being handled by a juvenile court because she was under 21 when she worked at the camp.

The public prosecutor’s office in Itzehoe, a small town northwest of Hamburg,  said in a statement that, “She’s accused of having assisted those responsible at the camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war in her function as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander.”

UPI reported that during the unnamed woman’s time working at the camp, the Nazis used Zyklon B gas chambers to exterminate prisoners. All told, the Nazis killed about 65,000 at Stutthof and transferred another 22,000 to other camps. Throughout World War II, German executed over six million Jews, along with the Roma population (gypsies), the disabled, gay people, political dissidents and prisoners of war.

NPR reported that the former secretary is also accused of aiding and abetting attempted murder – a charge that refers to the tens of thousands of people who survived despite the brutal conditions and cruel treatment that were imposed on them.

In a statement sent to NPR, Senior Public Prosecutor Peter Müller-Rakow used the  term “Heranwachsenden” to refer to the woman. Under German law,  that designates someone who is over 18 but not yet 21.

The Stutthof concentration camp was established in 1939, east of Gdansk along Poland’s Baltic coast, as was reported by NPR.  The new case is the first in years to target a woman who worked at a concentration camp, according to Agence France-Presse.

Prosecutors have increasingly sought out lower-level staff members of death camps in recent years, driven by the successful prosecution of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at another camp, on the grounds that he was an accessory to mass murder, as was reported by NPR.  The retired U.S. autoworker was 91 when he was convicted by a German court.

Last year, a Hamburg court found Bruno Dey, a former guard at the Stutthof camp, guilty of assisting in thousands of murders. Dey, who was 93 at the time, was given a two-year suspended sentence, according to the NPR report.

NPR reported that in the new case involving Sutthof, the woman had been the subject of an investigation since at least 2016, according to multiple local media outlets.

Speaking at her home in a retirement community, the woman also said that she wasn’t aware of mass poisonings or other acts of genocide — in part because her office window faced outward from the camp, as was reported by NPR.  The woman claims that it was only after the conclusion of the war that she was informed of the sadistic atrocities that took place inside the camp on a daily basis.  The woman also alleges that her assumption was that if anyone was executed at the camp where she worked it was because they did something to deserve it such as a criminal act or worse.

This line of skewed reasoning and blatant denial was common place during the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s when Nazi military officers and other Nazi staff at concentration camps claimed they were only taking orders from superiors and did not know of Jews being slaughtered en masse. Later, it was indisputably proven that the Nazis in question at the trial did indeed have direct knowledge of the genocide being perpetrated against the Jews in concentration camps and throughout Nazi occupied Europe.

Stutthof’s commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe was sentenced to prison in the late 1950s. Hoppe dictated letters to his secretary, who also handled correspondence and radio traffic, according to NDR. (UPI &, NPR)

 

balance of natureDonate

Latest article

- Advertisement -