AN arrest warrant has been issued for a 96-year-old woman who worked as a Nazi concentration camp secretary after she failed to turn up for the start of her trial in northern Germany.
Irmgard Furchner is understood to have gone on the run from her nursing home near Hamburg.
She is accused of complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof concentration camp in occupied Poland between 1943 and 1945.
She was 18 when she started work at the camp as a typist in the office of commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe, near the modern-day Polish city of Gdansk, which was then occupied by Nazi Germany and known as Danzig.
The defendant is one of the first women implicated in Nazi-era crimes to stand trial in decades.
A court spokesperson said Furchner's whereabouts were unknown.
"She left her home early in the morning in a taxi in the direction of a metro station," he said.
Charges cannot be read unless Furchner, who faces trial in juvenile court because of her young age at the time of the alleged crimes, is present in court.
Judge Dominik Gross said she was now a "fugitive".
Her trial was due to be followed by the start of proceedings against a 100-year-old former camp guard near Berlin. They are among the oldest individuals to be prosecuted.
Prosecutors claim Furchner assisted in the systematic murder of detainees at Stutthof.
According to Christoph Rueckel, a lawyer representing survivors of the Shoah who are party to the case, Ms Furchner "handled all the correspondence" for Hoppe.
"She typed out the deportation and execution commands" at his dictation and initialled each message herself, Mr Rueckel told public broadcaster NDR.
Furchner's lawyer, Wolf Molkentin, told the German weekly Spiegel, it was possible the secretary had been "screened off" from what was going on at Stutthof.
