In the trial of a former secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp, two judges visited the former German camp near Danzig in Poland on Friday. A historical expert who accompanied them wanted to explain the locations at the time of the Nazi rule to them.
The visit to the former concentration camp was part of the trial against Irmgard F., who is said to have worked as a civilian employee in the camp from 1943 to 1945. The public prosecutor’s office accuses the 97-year-old of having assisted the systematic murder of more than 11,000 prisoners as a typist. The accused has not yet made a statement in court.
During their visit, the judges wanted to clarify which areas of the camp the accused could see from her workplace at the time. Central to the process is the question of what was perceptible to her as a typist about the crimes committed. According to the spokeswoman, the judges want to report on the inspection of the former camp at the next trial date.
Unusual visit to a German court
Official visits by German courts to the sites of Nazi crimes in Poland are unusual. In the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1964, the court inspected the former extermination camp. The judges also traveled to the scene of the crime in the Majdanek trial before the Düsseldorf Regional Court (1975-1981), which lasted more than five years, as the lawyer and former Cologne public prosecutor Günther Feld explained. In another trial against SS-Unterscharführer Heinrich Kühnemann, the court went to Auschwitz in the early 1990s.
Stutthof was a relatively manageable camp, said a judge as a witness in Itzehoe. From the second floor of the headquarters one had “a very good overview”. The Berlin lawyer worked at the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg from 2014 to 2016 and initiated the preliminary investigations against Irmgard F.
