By Miranda Murray
BERLIN (Reuters) – A 96-year-old German woman who was detained shortly after fleeing before a hearing last month on charges of committing war crimes during World War II, appeared before a judge on Tuesday in the city of Itzehoe.
Irmgard Furchner, accused at age 18 of having contributed to the murder of 11,412 people when she was a typist at the Stutthof concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, was taken to the courtroom in a wheelchair.
Her face was barely visible behind a white mask and a headscarf pulled over her eyes. Security was tight as the judge and legal team entered the courtroom.
Between 1939 and 1945, around 65,000 people died of hunger and disease or in the gas chambers of the concentration camp near Gdansk, in present-day Poland. Among them, prisoners of war and Jews captured in the extermination campaign promoted by the Nazis.
The trial was postponed after Furchner left her home early Sept. 30 and fled for several hours before being detained the same day.
The charges could not be read until Furchner, who is facing trial in a teenagers’ court because of his young age at the time of the alleged crimes, was present in court.
She is the latest ninety-year-old to be charged with Holocaust-era crimes in what is seen as a race by prosecutors to seize the final opportunity to bring justice to victims of some of the worst mass murders in history.
Although prosecutors condemned the main perpetrators – those who issued orders or pulled the triggers – at the “Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials” in the 1960s, the practice until the 2000s was to leave lower-level suspects alone.
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