Former Nazi Camp Stenographer Captured After Trying To Flee Before Her Trial In Germany

A 96-year-old German woman, who was supposed to stand trial in connection with charges of helping and abetting killings in a Nazi concentration camp, tried to flee Thursday, but now has been caught.

Frederike Milhoffer, spokesperson at the court in Itzehoe, Germany, said that she left her home early morning in a taxi in the direction of a metro station, and when she didn't appear in court Thursday, an arrest warrant was issued, according to The Guardian.

Milhoffer told CNN that German cops located her, and said that the authorities are now assessing whether the elderly woman will be able to serve a jail sentence.

According to a court indictment, the former secretary, Irmgard Furchner, is "suspected of having aided and abetted 11,387 cases of murder," and the trial was set to begin Thursday when she decided to escape.

At the concentration camp in Stutthof, near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk, she worked as a typist and a stenographer in the commandant's office, and allegedly helped those in charge of the camp in the murders of prisoners from June 1943 to April 1945.

Furchner was an adolescent at the time of the alleged offenses, so she faces trial before a Juvenile Court Chamber. Unless she faces the court, charges can't be read, so the next hearing is scheduled for Oct. 19.

The International Auschwitz Committee, a group representing Nazi survivors and relatives of those who were murdered, expressed anger over her ability to escape, and said that it shows "incredible contempt for the rule of law and survivors," according to BBC.

At Stutthof, which was known for atrocious conditions, around 100,000 people were held and approximately 65,000 died. It had gas chambers, and people were murdered at the camp by using gas, lethal injection or shooting, and those murdered include several Jews and non-Jewish Polish people as well as Soviet soldiers.

Very few defendants are still alive, so Thursday's case was one of the last Nazi trials. Earlier this year, a former guard at Stutthof was declared to be not fit to stand trial. In 2020, another camp guard, Bruno Dey, was found guilty of complicity in the killings of more than 5,000 people, and was handed a suspended prison term.

Five years ago, Oskar Gröning, who was a bookkeeper at Auschwitz, was given a four-year jail term for being a part in the murder of thousands of people at the camp. In 2016, Reinhold Hanning, a guard at Auschwitz, was sentenced to five years in prison. The two, who were in their nineties at the time, died before having to serve their sentences.

A trial against a 100-year-old guard at the former Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen will begin next week.