After forty days of negotiations, the verdict was issued in one of the last trials against perpetrators from the Nazi era. The trial is considered historic because it was the first time that civilian employees of the Nazi system were on trial.
The accused Irmgard F. during the trial.
granny. / (dpa) The Itzehoe District Court found a former secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk guilty of being an accessory to murder in more than 10,500 cases. The criminal court sentenced the 97-year-old Irmgard F. to a two-year suspended sentence on Tuesday. It followed the prosecutor’s office.
The judges considered it proven that the accused worked as a civilian employee in the headquarters of Stutthof near Danzig from June 1943 to April 1945 and thus assisted those responsible in the concentration camp in the systematic killing of prisoners. Because she was only 18 to 19 years old at the time of the crime, the process was before a youth chamber.
Since the beginning of the trial in September 2021, negotiations had taken place over forty days. Due to the high age of the accused, the hearings only ever took place on one day a week and for two hours. In the meantime, the trial had to be interrupted for several weeks because the accused fell ill. There was also the fear that F. could die before the end of the trial.
Critics complained about the late start of the process. As early as 2016, the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg had made documents available to the public prosecutor’s office in Itzehoe. More than four years passed between the start of preliminary proceedings and the indictment.