Two former Nazis living in Germany have been charged over their role in the Holocaust.
On February 5, state prosecutors in Itzehoe, Schleswig-Holstein, charged a 95-year-old woman with more than 10,000 counts of accessory to murder.
‘Irmgard F’ worked as a stenographer and secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp between June 1943 and January 1945.
She worked as a typist after the war and today lives in a care home in the district of Pinneberg near Hamburg.
Located 22 miles east of what is today Danzig, Poland, 60,000 people died in Stutthof, which operated as a concentration camp from January 1942 until January 1945.
Victims included Jews from Warsaw and Białystok as well as Jews held in forced labour camps in the Baltic states prior to deportation.
Prosecutors in Neuruppin in the state of Brandenburg, meanwhile, charged a 100-year-old ex-concentration camp guard on February 9 with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder.
The former guard, who today lives in Brandenburg, worked at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin between 1942 and 1945. By the beginning of 1945, 11,110 Jews were imprisoned at Sachsenhausen.
Both he and Irmgard F. have been judged fit to stand trial. Because she was aged between 18 and 20 when engaged at Stutthof, Irmgard F. will be prosecuted as an adolescent and tried in juvenile court.
Their arrests are part of a last dash by German prosecutors to charge and convict the country’s final surviving Nazis using a legal precedent set down by the second trial of John Demjanjuk.
A former guard at Sobibor, Mr Demjanjuk was convicted in May 2011 by a Munich court on 27,900 counts of accessory to murder. It was enough that he had been part of the machinery of the Holocaust to find him guilty, the court ruled.
