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A 96-year-old woman who is due to be tried in Germany for her role as secretary of the German concentration camp at World War II has begun fleeing.
A court in the northern German city of Itzehoe on Thursday granted arrest warrant to the woman, identified as Irmgard F. Court attorney Friedrich Milhoffer said the woman “took a taxi” to her home in Quickborn, north of Hamburg, and fled to “an unknown location”.
The woman’s escape “shows a shocking disregard for the law and the survivors” of the Nazi party, says Christoph Heubner, Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee.
Opponents accuse him of having a role in the assassination of 11,412 people. The trial, which is set to begin on Thursday, is likely to be the last of a Nazi case in Germany. Opponents are still preparing some of their accusers against the Nazi party, but most of them are too old or sick to be tried.
During the war, Irmgard F. was a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp – near Danzig, then known as Gdansk in Poland – from June 1 1943 to April 1, 1945. About 65,000 people died in the camp. its satellites, and in the process of death occurs at the end of the war. Prisoners were hanged, tortured and killed with gas by Zyklon B. Many of them froze or starved or helped them to death.
Reports in the media say that SS-Sturmbannführer Paul-Werner Hoppe, the camp’s chief, had been executed, as well as prison rotas and lists of travelers to Auschwitz.
More than 50 journalists and observers, 12 representatives of the plaintiffs and others gathered to attend the first day of Irmgard F’s trial at the Itzehoe Chamber of Commerce – the town court was inadequate.
Der Spiegel reports that the singer, aged 18 to 19 while working for Stutthof, wrote a letter to Chief Justice Dominik Gross before the trial that he did not want to take part in the lawsuit because of his age and health. He also said he did not understand why he should be read here, more than 70 years after the war.
However, as a defendant, he is being questioned by German law to remain in court. Seeing his ability to stand trial was found to be possible for him for 1-2 hours each day.
In his letter to the judge, cited by Spiegel, Irmgard F. stated that letters relating to the execution of prisoners “did not pass through my hands”. “I have never seen the law, although Hoppe did not advise me to do so.” He also said that staff members know that prisoners have been killed. But the killings “did not happen so frequently that one could have the impression that people were being killed in the camp every day”.
Prosecution charges against Irmgard F. were made possible only after he was arraigned in 2011 against John Demjanjuk, a former camp commander, who was accused of helping to kill 28,000 people in the Sobibor genocide camp.
The Munich court ruling stated that anyone involved in “vandalism” was courageous and should be prosecuted.
The verdict resulted in the sentencing of former security guards and Oskar Gröning, an Auschwitz accountant. In July last year, Bruno Dey, a 94-year-old man who served as a security guard in Stutthof during the war, was sentenced to two years in prison after being sentenced to 5,230 murders.