- German woman, 91, charged in 260,000 Auschwitz deaths

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/09/22/1-year-old-woman-charged-with-260000-counts-complicity-to-murder-in-auschwitz/

FoxNews.com
WORLD

German prosecutors have charged a 91-year-old woman with playing a role in the deaths of 260,000 Jews at the infamous Auschwitz death camp.

The unidentified woman, who authorities say served as member of the Nazi SS is accused of serving as a radio operator for the camp commandant from April to July 1944, The Times of Israel reports. During that time, huge numbers of Hungarian Jews were murdered in gas chambers.

Prosecutors argue that she can be charged as an accessory because she aided in the operation of the death camp. Heinz Doellel, a spokesman for the prosecutor, said there are no indications the woman is unfit for trial, though a court likely won't decide on whether to proceed with the case until next year.

The case is the latest in a series of attempts by Germany to bring surviving Holocaust perpetrators to justice. Only 50 of the 6,500 former SS members who served at Auschwitz have been convicted in Germany, as the courts long claimed only senior Nazi leadership could be held responsible for Holocaust crimes, The Telegraph reports.

Earlier this year, a 94-year-old man known as the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz" was incarcerated under similar circumstances. Prosecutors argued Oskar Groenig’s presence when Jews entered the camp created a threatening impression, the BBC says.

Groenig admitted in a 2005 BBC documentary that he had been present on the ramp when selections for the gas chambers took place, and said during the trial he bears a share of the moral guilt for atrocities committed at the camp.

The former SS member was in charge of confiscating prisoners' luggage upon entry and deceiving them by saying their belongings would be returned. He would instead sort and count their money and ship it to Nazis in Berlin.

He was sentenced to four years in prison in connection with the murder of 300,000 people at the death camp. The judgment claims he “supported multiple murders, without providing support to specific individual acts,” the BBC adds.

The decision marks a departure from the court’s decades-old practice of requiring proof former SS members directly committed at least one crime in order to be convicted.

Some 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, died between 1940 and 1945 at Auschwitz before it was liberated by Soviet forces.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.  

First of all women were not allowed to join the SS.

They were termed "helpers".

Charging a 91yo women that worked in a radio room as an accessory to murder is just phucking absurd.

Well it should be easy enough to prove with any existing records of her radio traffic. If she was sending daily body counts of the dead back to Berlin, kind of tough to claim you had no clue of what was happening.

Women were indeed part of the Waffen SS, but only allowed to be called 'auxiliary members', and could only serve as prison camp guards or in administrative positions. Pictures of women in SS uniforms at the time are a little confusing because it became trendy for the girlfriends/wives of Waffen SS troops to take photos of themselves wearing the uniforms of their men. A woman in a photo wearing an ill fitting uniform is likely one of these 'cheesecake' pics, while a well tailored and turned out photo is likely to be more legit.

If her duties were sending radio messages for food, ammo, gas, and other routine supplies, then it gets a little more difficult to prove any culpability.

If she worked in a bunker for example, and had no direct line of sight or could not hear killings taking place, then she's a clerk. If you have evidence however that she say dated a guard, or was even a female guard herself who knew what was happening, again a no brainer to convict her.

Of course the argument at her advanced age is she can't survive even a token prison sentence, so she'll likely die before going to trial. My thought on these old war criminals is either the firing squad or the gas chamber. Karma's a bi-yotch, so give em a little taste of what they handed out to millions. Seems fair.

Women were not allowed to join the SS.

They were termed SS- Helferin.... SS Helper..

Even the women that were guards were not recognized as being members of the SS. Period.

This particular woman was at the camp for 3 whole months and she was 20 years old. Interestingly she will have to be charged as a minor..

WTF is the point.

Personally, I don't care how old she is, anymore than I cared how old the previous men were who were charged, & dragged out of South America.

If she was 20 at the time, oh well. Both male & female were considered an adult, back then, long before 20 yrs old.

I definitely will be following this case, to see exactly what was her ' job description' (not the title), and what if anything, she knew.

I'd be okay, with the courts going all
'Inglorious Bastards' on the former Nazis.