NAZI, 96, FLEES
Camp worker caught, but slay trial delayed
A 96-year-old former Nazi concentration-camp secretary went AWOL in Germany on Thursday to avoid the opening of her trial involving more than 11,000 murders but was caught after several hours on the run.
Irmgard Furchner fled from a retirement home on the outskirts of Hamburg, and the court where she was supposed to appear issued an arrest warrant.
“The accused is on the run,” Frederike Milhoffer, a spokesperson for the Itzehoe district court, said in announcing the trial delay.
“She left her home early in the morning in a taxi in the direction of a metro station.”
Furchner had previously “announced that she didn’t want to come” to court but had not been expected “actively to evade the trial” because of her age and apparent frail condition, Milhoffer said.
She was eventually picked up on the arrest warrant, officials announced, without detailing exactly where or how she was found.
Judge Dominik Gross suspended the opening of the trial until Oct. 19, and ordered a doctor to examine the suspect before he rules on whether she is fit to be detained.
Furchner is accused of having contributed to the murders of 11,412 people while working as a typist at the Stutthof concentration camp between 1943 and 1945.
The court said in a statement before the trial was set to begin that she “aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there.”
Despite her age, she was due to stand trial in juvenile court because she was 18 or younger at the time.
Furchner had earlier pleaded with the court that she was too frail to stand trial.
“Apparently, that’s not exactly the case,” Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Jerusalem, told The Associated Press.
“If she is healthy enough to flee, she is healthy enough to be incarcerated,” Zuroff insisted, saying that her decision to make a run for it before her trial began should also affect the punishment.”
According to authorities, Furchner transcribed execution orders dictated to her by camp commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe, who was convicted of accessory to murder in 1955.
Her defense team has said the trial will center on whether Furchner’s work at the camp meant she knew of the atrocities being carried out there.
“My client worked in the midst of SS men who were experienced in violence. However, does that mean she shared their state of knowledge? That is not necessarily obvious,” one of her lawyers, Wolf Molkentin, told Der Spiegel.