A warrant has been issued for the arrest of a 96-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary who failed to show up for the first day of her murder trial in northern Germany on Thursday.
Irmgard Furchner went “on the run†after she left the retirement home where she lives near Hamburg in a taxi on Thursday morning and has not been seen since, court officials in Itzehoe told German media.Â
Furchner allegedly worked from 1943 to 1945 as a secretary for an SS commander at the Stutthof concentration camp on present-day Poland’s Baltic coast, where more than 60,000 people were estimated to have been killed during the Nazi genocide.
Furchner, facing charges of being an accessory to the murders of more than 11,000 people, was to be tried in juvenile court, because she was under 21 when the crimes occurred.
She “aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office,†Itzehoe state court said in a statement before the trial.
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