Former female Nazi guard, 96, on the run from nursing home hours before trial over murder of 11,000 Jewish prisoners
A FORMER female Nazi guard is on the run after fleeing her nursing home just hours before she was due to go on trial accused of playing a part in the murder of more than 11,000 Jewish prisoners.
Irmgard Furchner, 96, was last seen leaving her care home – where she is described as ''sprightly for her age" – and boarding a subway train in Germany.
Judge Dominic Gros announced her trial was delayed and then revealed she had gone on the run, and police were last night examining CCTV of the station to see if they could pick her up.
Furchner worked at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk, Poland, during World War Two.
She is currently living in a care home in Schleswig-Holstein but has been under investigation for several years and is fully aware of what is going on.
Staff describe the pensioner as ''one of our most sprightly residents''.
Prosecutors in Itzehoe, northern Germany, said Furchner was accused
of having assisted those responsible at the concentration camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian
prisoners.
She worked as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander
Paul Werne-Hoppe between June 1943 and April 1945.
Besides being charged with aiding and abetting 11,412 murders, she is also accused of complicity in 18 attempted murders.
Due to her age at the time of the allegations, Furchner, who lives in a
retirement home in Pinneburg, near Hamburg, will appear before a juvenile court.
Prosecutors began their investigation in 2016 and have questioned
Holocaust survivors in Israel and the US as part of their probe.
Documents are said to have been seized from her room at the care home
and she has admitted working at the camp where more than 65,000 people
died.
At the end of World War Two, Furchner was questioned by Allied
investigators about Hoppe and described him as a ''conscientious
worker'' but she had no knowledge of any deaths at the camp.
Hoppe fled to Switzerland in 1945 and worked as a gardener under a new
identity but was eventually arrested in 1953 and later tried as an
accessory to murder. He was given nine years and died in 1974 aged 64.
Lawyer Onur Özata, who represents two co-plaintiffs and Stutthof survivors in the proceedings, has called on authorities to catch Furchner.
He told BILD: "The accused is fooling the judiciary with her behavior.
"Apparently she does not feel bound by the local law. The law enforcement authorities must now do everything possible to get hold of the concentration camp secretary.
"Anything else would be unbearable for the survivors."
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