Germany’s Federal Court on Tuesday upheld the conviction of a 99-year-old former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp for complicity in the mass murder of more than 10,000 people between June 1943 and April 1945.
The court in the eastern city of Leipzig has rejected the appeal against a December 2022 ruling by the regional court in Itzehoe, north of Hamburg.
The regional court had sentenced the woman to a two-year suspended juvenile sentence for complicity in murder in 10,505 cases and attempted murder in five cases.
The woman, identified as Irmgard F under German privacy laws, was given a juvenile sentence because she was under 21 at the time of the crimes. Tuesday’s decision is now final.
This case is seen as possibly the last criminal trial to address Nazi mass murders.
Irmgard F worked as a typist in the office of the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof, near the then Free City of Danzig (present-day Gdansk in Poland) when she was 18-19 years old.
The regional court had ruled that the young woman, through her work, had helped camp officials systematically kill prisoners. Supportive activities could also be legally seen as complicity in murder.
