Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A 96-year old former concentration camp secretary will stand trial in a German juvenile court, accused of having aided the murder and attempted murder of more than 11,000 prisoners at the Stutthof death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

On Friday, a German court in the town of Itzehoe, near Hamburg, ruled in favor of starting the main proceedings in the case of Irmgard Furchner, who was employed as a typist to camp commander Paul-Werner Hoppe in Stutthof, when she was 18 or 19. The first main hearing of the trial is scheduled for September. About 65,000 people died during the Holocaust at the Stutthof camp.

According to the indictment of the Itzehoe public prosecutor’s office, as reported in Germany’s Bild Zeitung, Furchner is charged “in her role as a typist and stenotypist in the camp commander’s office of the former Stutthof concentration camp between June 1943 and April 1945 to have helped those responsible at the camp with the systematic killing of those imprisoned there.”

The inmates were Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war.

Furchner, who currently lives in in a nursing home near the city of Hamburg, has already testified twice as a witness regarding her role in Stutthof, in 1954 and 1962. In 1954, she stated that she handled all correspondence with the SS economic administration main office, and that Hoppe had dictated daily letters to her and ordered radio messages. Furchner stated that at the time she knew nothing about the killing machinery that exterminated tens of thousands in the immediate vicinity while she was on duty.

In March this year, a court in Wuppertal, Germany, ruled that a 96-year-old former Stutthof concentration camp guard was “unfit to stand trial,” though noted that there is a “high degree of probability” that he is guilty of the crimes.