he left the nursing home in a taxi

A 96-year-old former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp fled before the opening on Thursday in Germany of her trial, in which she was to be tried for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people.

“The defendant He ran away (…) and an arrest warrant has been issued, “announced the president of the court, 20 minutes after the scheduled start of the trial in the town of Itzehoe, in northern Germany.

“He left his home (for the elderly) this morning. I take a taxi“said court spokeswoman Frederike Milhoffer.

His lawyer, Wolf Molkentin, was present in the courtroom, but made no statement.

Irmgard Furchner, that at the time of the alleged crimes tI was between 18 and 19 years old, it should be the first woman involved in Nazism to be judged for decades in the country.

This judgment was to precede that of a centenary, a former nazi concentration camp guard from Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, which will start in a week.

Until now, Germany had never tried such elderly ex-Nazis.

She was also due to be executed on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the death sentence by hanging in Nuremberg on the 12th of main leaders of the Third Reich.

The prosecution accuses the nonagenarian of having participated in the murder of inmates at the Stutthof concentration camp in present-day Poland, where she worked as a typist and secretary to the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, between June 1943 and April 1945.

Nails 65,000 people died on the ground, near the city of Gdansk, among them “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war”, according to the prosecution.

Lawyer Christoph Rückel, who has represented Holocaust survivors for years, assures us that “she was responsible for all correspondence of the camp commander ”.

“He also typed the execution and expulsion orders and put his initials ”, he assured the regional public network NDR.

After lengthy proceedings, the court ruled in February that the nonagenarian was fit to appear despite her advanced age. But court hearings should be limited to a few hours a day.

Seventy-six years later After the end of World War II, German justice continues to search for the surviving ex-Nazi criminals.

Various German prosecutors are currently examining eight cases implicating in particular former employees of the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück camps, indicated the Central Office for the Clarification of the Crimes of National Socialism in the AFP.

In recent years, several processes have had to be abandoned by the death of suspects or his physical handicap to appear in court.

But although Germany has convicted four former guards or employees of the Nazi camps of Sobibor, Auschwitz and Stutthof over the past ten years, it has ruled very few women involved in the Nazi machine, according to historians.

Justice has analyzed the cases of at least three other employees of the Nazi campMostly another secretary who worked at Stutthof, but this one died last year before the process was completed.

The Neuruppin prosecutor’s office near Berlin is currently examining the case of another woman employed in the Ravensbrück camp, according to the Ludwigsburg headquarters.

The role of women

Nails 4,000 women worked as babysitters in concentration camps, according to historians, but few were tried after the war.

Among those who answered for crimes committed during the Third Reich was the guard of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Maria mandl, nicknamed “the ferocious beast”, was hanged in 1948 following his death sentence by a court in Krakow.

Between 1946 and 1948, in Hamburg, 38 people, including 21 women appeared before the judges British soldier for having worked in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which was specially reserved for women.

The case law which led to the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, warden of the Sobibor camp in 1943, to five years in prison, now allows pursue by complicity in tens of thousands of murders to any concentration camp aide, from a guard to an accountant.

With information from AFP