The trial of the former secretary of the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof began on Thursday, September 30, 2021 in northern Germany. The prosecutor’s office in the German city of Itseho accuses Irmgard F. of complicity in massacres, or rather, in the murder of more than 11 thousand camp prisoners by helping the direct perpetrators of the crimes. From June 1943 to April 1945, the accused worked as a secretary for the commandant of the Hoppe camp.
The woman did not appear at the meeting. The court has issued a warrant for her arrest, presiding judge Dominik Groß said.
Earlier, Irmgard F. had already appeared at another trial of Nazi criminals, but as a witness. She admitted that Commandant Hoppe daily dictated to her the texts of orders and other documents, but stressed that she knew nothing about the massacres taking place in the immediate vicinity of her workplace.
Stutthof concentration camp commandant’s office
The trials of Nazi criminals are overdue
Until the very beginning of the trial in Itseho, it was unclear whether the defendant would be able to take part in it – Irmgard F. is now 96 years old. The trial was very late, many say, including those who themselves witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust. This is the opinion, for example, of Abba Naor, who at the age of 16 was deported from Kaunas, where his family lived, to the Stutthof concentration camp. “We were not taken to the concentration camp office, and I did not see how the secretary worked,” Naor says. “But if she committed a crime, why wasn’t she tried earlier?” Therefore, Naor, who now lives in Israel, refused to become a plaintiff at the trial of Irmgard F. And in general, he says, “living with the thought that you have committed such a crime before people is sometimes harder than going to jail.” The elderly woman should be left alone, Naor said.
But not many Holocaust survivors think so. Lawyer Onur Özata, who represents several plaintiffs at the same time, tells DW about this. The decision to participate in the court, after all, is usually not made out of a sense of revenge, he notes: it is important for the majority to be in the courtroom and tell their descendants about their experiences. According to the lawyer, Holocaust witnesses often tell him: “We just don’t want these victims to be forgotten.”
Abba Naor
What does attorney Irmgard F.
The trials of Nazi criminals, albeit belated ones, are considered correct by the defendant’s lawyer. According to Wolf Molkentin, “there is no point in regretting the lost time, the fact that many executioners have escaped responsibility – and at the same time immediately declare that the current processes are no longer worth arranging.”
According to the lawyer, he is not going to question the statements of the witnesses at the trial: “On the contrary, it is extremely important for me to create a decent framework for perpetuating and investigating the main crimes.”
Wolf Molkentin
Nazi Criminal Trials Continue
The trial that has begun against Irmgard F. is far from the only trial of this kind in modern Germany. In July 2020, former Stutthof security guard Bruno D., who was 93 years old at the time of sentencing, was convicted in Hamburg. And even then the question was asked: why is the SS guard being tried only now?
The fact is that before the well-known case of the Nazi criminal Ivan Demjanjuk in Germany, it was necessary to prove the personal participation of the defendants in specific crimes. Which, for obvious reasons, is not easy: there are few witnesses left, they are also elderly people, several decades have passed after the war … , each overseer was involved in the destruction of his prisoners. Based on this judicial precedent, Oskar Gröning, among others, was later convicted, in particular, in 2015. Then it was Bruno D.’s turn, and now – to Irmgard F.
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