Summary: German prosecutors have charged a 91-year-old woman with over 260,000 counts of accessory to murder for her work as a Nazi.
After more than sixty years, a 91-year-old woman has been charged in Germany for working as a Nazi radio operator for 4 months in 1944.
According to German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur the woman was under 21 when she committed the alleged crimes. Consequently she will be tried in a court for minors.
A court in the northern city of Kiel will decide whether to proceed with a trial next year. Per the city’s chief prosecutor, Heinz Dollel, the court will consider both the seriousness of the charges and the woman’s health in its decision.
The woman has been deemed fit to stand trial, but remains unnamed under German privacy laws. It is known that she belonged to an all-female unit that helped the Nazi SS in concentration camps.
The months in question—April to July of 1944—correspond to a period when huge numbers of Hungarian Jews were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Consequently, many are speculating the woman’s crimes are tied to the infamous concentration camp.
This July, a 94-year-old former SS officer, Oskar Groening, was sentenced to four years in prison for crimes committed in the same four-month period in 1944. Groenig was deemed an accessory to murder in 300,000 cases related to the gassing of Hungarian Jews.
Read more about Oskar Groening here.
The news of the latest indictment is ripping open new wounds. Is it a hyperbolic case of not being able to let go of the past and extend much-needed forgiveness after all these decades? Or is it, at long last, much-needed justice for the victims’ families?
Source: Fox News
Other sources: The Guardian