German prosecutors have charged the elderly secretary of the former SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp with 10,000 counts of accessory to murder, arguing that she was part of the apparatus that helped the camp function.

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The 95-year-old also faces an unspecified number of counts of accessory to attempted murder for her service at the camp between June 1943 and April 1945, Peter Mueller-Rakow, spokesman for prosecutors in the northern town of Itzehoe, said Friday.

Despite her advanced age, the suspect will be tried in juvenile court as she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes, Mueller-Rakow said.

The suspect, whom Mueller-Rakow would not identify in line with German privacy laws, is believed to be in good enough health to stand trial.

She has previously been partially identified as Irmgard F. by Germany's NDR public broadcaster, which interviewed her at the retirement home where she now lives in a small community north of Hamburg.

She confirmed to NDR that she had worked as the secretary to SS officer Paul Werner Hoppe in Stutthof, but said she never set foot in the camp itself and did not know of murders taking place there.

Hoppe was himself tried and convicted of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to nine years in prison in 1957. He died in 1974.

NDR cited a 1954 statement Irmgard F. had made when interviewed as a witness ahead of the trial, in which she told authorities all Hoppe's correspondence with higher SS administration had gone past her desk and that the commandant had dictated her letters daily.

She also said she did not know of prisoners being gassed, but told authorities at the time she was aware Hoppe had ordered executions, which she presumed were as punishment for infractions, NDR reported.

The case against her will rely on new German legal precedent established in cases over the last decade that anyone who helped Nazi death camps and concentration camps function can be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there, even without evidence of participation in a specific crime.

"In the trial we will focus on the suspect who was in the camp as a secretary, and her concrete responsibility for the functioning of the camp," Mueller-Rakow said.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig – now the Polish city of Gdansk – Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called "work education camp" where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.
Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure, or were put to death in a gas chamber.

Last year, a former SS private, Bruno Dey, was convicted at age 93 of more than 5,000 counts of accessory to murder for serving at Stutthof as a guard and given a two-year suspended sentence.

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Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder by the Hamburg state court, news agency dpa reported. That is equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945. He also was convicted as an accessory to attempted murder.

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"How could you get used to the horror?" presiding judge Anne Meier-Goering asked as she announced the verdict. She said that the fact Dey was taking orders didn't free him from guilt.

Because he was 17 and 18 at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey's case was heard in juvenile court. Prosecutors had called for a three-year sentence, while the defense sought acquittal.

The judge said that, while Dey should have tried to avoid service at Stutthof, the sentence was appropriate to his guilt.

"You were not yet grown up then, still so young in a time when a lack of conscience had seized a whole people as never before," Meier-Goering said.

The trial opened in October. Because of Dey's age, court sessions were limited to two, two-hour sessions a week. Additional precautions also were taken to keep the case going through the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a closing statement earlier this week, the wheelchair-bound German retiree apologized for his role in the Nazis' machinery of destruction, saying "it must never be repeated."

"Today, I want to apologize to all of the people who went through this hellish insanity," Dey told the court.

For at least two decades, every trial of a former Nazi has been dubbed "likely Germany's last." But just last week, another ex-guard at Stutthof was charged at age 95. A special prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi-era crimes has more than a dozen ongoing investigations.

That's due in part to a precedent established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, who steadfastly denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.

German courts previously required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guard's participation in a specific killing, often near-impossible.

However, prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk's trial in Munich that guarding a camp whose only purpose was murder was enough for an accessory conviction.

A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening, solidifying the precedent.

The Dey case extends the argument to apply to a guard at a concentration camp that did not exist for the sole purpose of extermination.

Prosecutors argued that as a Stutthof guard from August 1944 to April 1945, Dey – though "no ardent worshipper of Nazi ideology" – aided all the killings that took place there during that period as a "small wheel in the machinery of murder."

Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's office in Jerusalem, criticized the suspended sentence as "tainting the process" of trying to bring justice for Holocaust survivors, saying Dey waited until he was facing jail time before apologizing for his actions.

"We're very pleased he's convicted but upset about the sentence, which in a certain sense is an insult to the survivors," Zuroff said in a telephone interview. "There has to be some element of punishment."

Dey gave wide-ranging statements to investigators about his service, saying that he was deemed unfit for combat in the regular Germany army in 1944 so was drafted into an SS guard detachment and sent to the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called "work education camp" where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

From mid-1944, when Dey was posted there, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure, or were put to death in a gas chamber.

Dey told the court that as a trained baker's apprentice, he attempted to get sent to an army kitchen or bakery when he learned he'd been assigned to Stutthof.

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As a guard there, he said he frequently was directed to watch over prisoner labor crews working outside the camp.

Dey acknowledged hearing screams from the camp's gas chambers and watching as corpses were taken to be burned, but he said he never fired his weapon and once allowed a group to smuggle meat from a dead horse they'd discovered back into the camp.

"The images of misery and horror have haunted me my entire life," he testified.

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More than seven decades later, Dey is going on trial Thursday on 5,230 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court. Prosecutors argue that by standing guard at the camp from August 1944 to April 1945, the 93-year-old helped Stutthof function and was thus "a small wheel in the machinery of murder."

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"The accused was no ardent worshipper of Nazi ideology," prosecutors say in the indictment, reviewed by The Associated Press. "But there is also no doubt that he never actively challenged the persecutions of the Nazi regime."

Dey, a baker by training, told prosecutors he was deemed unfit for the front at age 17 in 1944 because of a heart problem, so instead was sent as a guard to Stutthof, and suggested that with or without him the killing would have taken place.

If he hadn't been there, "they would have just found someone else," he said.

Dey's attorney, Stefan Waterkamp, said his client stood by his statements to police and prosecutors. But he noted that the indictment did not link him to any specific killing and that it would be up to the court to decide whether standing guard in a watchtower alone is enough to convict him.

"Many people were killed in many ways at Stutthof," Waterkamp said. "Some were directly killed, some were killed by starvation, some were killed by typhus – the question is who is immediately responsible?"

In recent years, prosecutors have successfully convicted former death camp guards using the argument that by helping camps like Auschwitz and Sobibor function, they were accessories to the murders there even without evidence of involvement in a specific killing.

The 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening on such reasoning was upheld by a German federal court, solidifying the precedent.

In Dey's case, the reasoning is being applied to a concentration camp rather than a death camp. Still, prosecutors have expressed confidence it still pertains, since tens of thousands of people were killed in Stutthof even though – unlike at the death camps – the site's sole purpose wasn't murder.

Stutthof was established by Nazi Germany in 1939 east of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk, and was initially used as the main collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from the city.

From about 1940, it was used as a so-called "work education camp" where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died. Others incarcerated there included criminals, political prisoners, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

From mid-1944, when Dey was posted there, it was filled with tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos being cleared by the Nazis in the Baltics as well as from Auschwitz, and thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

In the end, more than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothes until they died of exposure, or put to death in a gas chamber.

Asked if he knew who was being killed, Dey told prosecutors his SS comrades talked of the "extermination of the Jews" and said he had "done people wrong" by serving there.

"I did not know why they were there," Dey told prosecutors. "I knew well that they were Jews who had committed no crime, that they were only there because they were Jews. And they have the same right to live and to work like any other person. But it was just that Hitler or his party were against that, who had something against the Jews."

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