A 96-year-old former Nazi camp secretary was supposed to stand trial Shes now on the run

A 96-year-old woman who worked as a secretary at a Nazi concentration camp in World War II has now fled her trial, hours before she had to face a German court on charges of complicity in the killings of more than 10,000 people.

It was supposed to be the first of many hearings until June next year. But Irmgard Furchner did not show up on Thursday morning, and the court announced she had run away from her home in a cab to a subway station.

Police are now looking for the woman, who reportedly lives in a nursing home near Hamburg, with an arrest warrant, a spokeswoman for the state Itzehoe court in northern Germany told The Washington Post. If they catch the defendant soon, the trial could still kick off but the charges cannot be read in her absence, Frederike Milhoffer added.

While Germany has tried former camp guards and accountants over Nazi crimes, the fleeing suspect is the first woman to face charges for many years. Prosecutors accused her this year of aiding in murders of prisoners between 1943 and 1945 when she was the stenographer and typist of the commandant of Stutthof camp in Poland. A juvenile court was due to hear the case because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes.

The charges against the former typist stemmed from an investigation that entailed interviews with witnesses since 2016 and spanned several countries, according to Germany’s dpa news agency. Her lawyer has questioned whether she ever knew the details of the atrocities that unfolded in the camp where she worked.

Law enforcement officials seeking to bring closure for Holocaust crimes face a race against time as more and more alleged Nazi staff and their victims die from old age before they can go to court.

More than 60,000 people are believed to have died at Stutthof, where victims including Jews, Poles and Soviet soldiers were encircled by electric barbed wire fences in a wooded, secluded part of Poland. Guards put prisoners to death in a gas chamber, doctors killed others too sick to work with injections, and many died of disease.

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