A 91-Year-Old woman who worked at Auschwitz during World War II has been accused of complicity in the murders of at least 260,000 Jewish people.
A court in the northern Germany city of Kiel is deciding whether to proceed with a trial next year. According to the city’s chief prosecutor, Heinz Dollel, the woman belonged to an all-female unit that helped the Nazi SS in concentration camps.
She worked as a telegraph operator in Auschwitz between April to July 1944. Those three months correspond to a time when massive numbers of Hungarian Jews were murdered in the gas chambers.
Recently in July a 94-year-old former SS officer, Oskar Groening, was sentenced to four years in jail as an accessory to murder in 300,000 cases at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He was known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”.
Groening was an accountant who sorted, counted, and took money from those killed or in slavery. He would send the cash to his Nazi superiors in Berlin.
Groening’s case was expected to be the last of the holocaust trials until this anonymous woman was uncovered. She would be tried in a court for minors because she was under 21 during the war and time of the alleged crimes.
Some 1.1 million people perished between 1940 to 1945 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
Unusually for trials of former Nazi camp guards, Groening was open about his past throughout the proceedings. He bears a share of the moral guilt for the atrocities at the camp.
There are no indications the woman is unfit for trial.
