After the Itzehoe District Court sentenced a former civilian employee of the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp near Gdansk to a youth sentence of two years on probation, the defense and a co-plaintiff appealed to the Federal Court of Justice. As the Itzehoe district court announced on Wednesday, the revision can only be based on the fact that the judgment is based on a violation of the law. The 3rd Large Juvenile Chamber of the Itzehoe District Court had found the now 97-year-old Irmgard F. guilty on December 20 of being an accessory to murder in more than 10,000 cases.
According to Itzehoe district court, the law is violated if a legal norm has not been applied or has not been applied correctly (§ 337 StPO). It is therefore purely a matter of law and not of fact. The Federal Court of Justice examines whether proceedings have been conducted properly and whether substantive law has been applied correctly. Evidence will not be taken again.
According to the indictment, Irmgard F. worked as a civilian employee in the administration of the camp from 1943 to 1945, where she worked as a secretary and shorthand typist. Since she was between 18 and 19 at the time, the trial against her took place before a juvenile chamber.
The two defense attorneys had demanded an acquittal for their client. They justified this by saying that it could not be proven beyond a doubt that Irmgard F. knew about the systematic killings in the camp. The 97-year-old had said in her so-called last word: “I’m sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time. I can not say more.”
The process began on September 30, 2021. During the 40 days of the hearing, the court heard eight of the 31 joint plaintiffs as witnesses. The survivors of the camp reported on the suffering and mass deaths in Stutthof.
According to the prosecution, Irmgard F.’s paperwork ensured that the camp could be maintained. Due to her willingness to work, she was an important support for the camp commandant and his adjutants. The defendant never commented on the allegations against her during the trial. According to historians, around 65,000 people died in the Stutthof concentration camp. Many Jews were among the prisoners.
“The chamber is convinced that the defendant perceived the content of the texts she had written herself,” the judge said when the verdict was pronounced. “The defendant sat at the central interface; what happened in Stutthof did not remain hidden from her.” In fact, she worked in the immediate vicinity of the prison camp. The smell of burned corpses was omnipresent at the time and could even be felt outside the camp.
“It is simply beyond imagination that she could not have noticed the death,” the judge continues. And it is “inconceivable” that she did not notice that these circumstances did not change, that they even got worse and that the “camp management that she supports” deliberately did it that way. “She was not an uninvolved citizen, but an auxiliary for the precise purpose of assisting in the implementation of the camp’s goals.”
