Stutthof concentration camp
Stutthof concentration campiStock

A former secretary from the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp has been charged with complicity in the murders of 10,000 people, German prosecutors said Friday, according to CNN.

Prosecutors in Itzehoe did not name the woman but said in a statement that they charged her with "aiding and abetting murder in more than 10,000 cases," as well as complicity in attempted murder.

The woman, who was a minor at the time of the alleged crimes, "is accused of having assisted those responsible at the camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war in her function as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander," between June 1943 and April 1945, the prosecutors said in a statement quoted by CNN.

She will face a juvenile court because she was under 18 when she served in Stutthof.

Stutthof was first established by the Nazis in 1939 and went on to house a total of 115,000 prisoners, more than half of whom died there. Around 22,000 went on to be transferred from Stutthof to other Nazi camps.

Last year, 93-year-old Stutthof camp guard Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945.

Because he was 17 and 18 at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey’s case was heard in juvenile court and he was given a two-year suspended sentence.

At the start of the trial, Dey said he was sorry for his actions, though he insisted that he did not join the deadly operation voluntarily.

Germany has opened many cases against suspected Nazi war criminals in recent years.

Its crackdown began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp and sentenced to five years. He died in 2012.

Some of those convicted of Nazi-era war crimes never served their sentences as they passed away before being jailed.

One such convict, Reinhold Hanning, was found guilty of complicity in the mass murders at Auschwitz. However, Hanning died at the age of 95 in June of 2017, before he could serve his jail term.

In a similar case, Oskar Groening, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, died in March of 2018 before he could begin serving a four-year prison sentence after being convicted for the crime of accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz.

Last April, a German court dropped a case against 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, Johann Rehbogen, finding him unfit for trial due to illness.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)