Female Nazi concentration camp secretary charged with complicity in 10,000 murders in Germany
A former secretary from the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp has been charged with complicity in the murders of 10,000 people, German prosecutors said Friday, in what is a rare case involving an alleged female concentration camp staff member.
Prosecutors in Itzehoe did not name the woman but said in a statement that they charged her with “aiding and abetting murder in more than 10,000 cases,” as well as complicity in attempted murder.
The woman, who was a minor at the time of the alleged crimes, “is 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,” between June 1943 and April 1945, the prosecutors said in a statement.
She will face a juvenile court because she was under 18 when she served in Stutthof.
It is estimated that about 65,000 people were murdered during the Holocaust in the Stutthof concentration camp, near the Polish city now called Gdansk.
German prosecutors are investigating 13 other cases connected to the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and Stutthof, according to the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes.
Last summer, a 93-year-old former guard at Stutthof, identified as Bruno D., was convicted of thousands of counts of being an accessory to murder and given a two-year suspended prison sentence
He, too, was tried in a juvenile court because because he was 17 years old at the time he served in Stutthof.
First established by the Nazis in 1939, Stutthof went on to house a total of 115,000 prisoners, more than half of whom died there. Around 22,000 went on to be transferred from Stutthof to other Nazi camps.
An estimated 6 million Jewish people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Also killed were hundreds of thousands of Roma people and people with mental or physical disabilities.
