The woman, who now lives in a retirement home in north Germany, has been indicted by prosecutors following an inquiry.
Prosecutors said in a statement that she’d been accused of having helped those responsible at the camp of the systematic slaughter of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoner of war in her capacity as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander.
Over 10,000 people were executed in the Stutthof concentration camp’s gas chambers during the war.
In their statement, prosecutors said the charges ran from June 1943 to April 1945.
The accused, who wasn’t identified by prosecutors, was a minor at the time and so will be tried in juvenile court.
Prosecutors in the north German city of Itzehoe said she will also be tried for complicity in attempted murder.
Germany has been working to try Nazi staff who worked at concentration camps throughout the war. This has stepped since the 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk.
Based on working as part of the Nazi apparatus, he was later indicted by prosecutors.
The most recent case is that of 93-year-old former SS guard Bruno Dey, who was handed a two-year suspended sentence by a court in Hamburg.
Bruno Dey had also worked at the Stutthof concentration camp which was set up in 1939.
Accountant at Auschwitz Oskar Groening and former guard Reinhold Hanning was both also found guilty following trials.
The thing is, this woman was a child when she worked there, and it seems that she didn’t have much of a choice, so, was she really an accomplice? Because she was literally a child, not an adult with an autonomous say in her life, and this would be a ludicrous miscarriage of justice.
And if a child takes notes at an organised crime meeting, should she actually be prosecuted seventy years later? But then it seems that age has no statute for murder, but the story does state that the accused, who wasn’t identified by prosecutors, was a minor at the time, and that’s why it’s being tried in juvenile court, so she will presumably get a slap on the wrist anyhow.
However, those that have been captured and punished is seemingly less than 1 in a 1,000 of the murderers responsible for German war crimes. And to be honest, if every German that committed capital war crimes in World War II had been hung, most of their population would have vanished into thin air, just like the Jews did.
Some might say that Germany should never be allowed to forget what they did to the Jews and the world, but on the other hand, that would mean that no country on the planet should be allowed to forget what their forefathers did to them, or is this just reserved for Germany?
And at this woman’s great age, and living in a care home. If found blameworthy, what would be the point of a life sentence, or even working in the community?
At her age, she might understand what’s going on in court, but it will be virtually impossible to find any witnesses after all these years. She was a young girl and she might have known something of what was going on, other than frantically trying to keep herself alive by obeying orders, and isn’t this just 75 years too late?
