Former concentration camp secretary, 97, appeals guilty verdict

The 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has filed an appeal against her guilty verdict for her role in the deaths that took place at her place of work.

"The verdict is thus not legally binding," the relevant court in northern Germany said on Wednesday.

Identified only as Irmgard F under German privacy laws, she was found guilty on December 20 of complicity in more than 10,500 cases of murder and given a two-year suspended sentence by a court in northern Germany.

Following the appeal, the Federal Supreme Court has to examine whether a procedural error was made.

Seventy-seven years after the end of World War II, Irmgard F's case is sure to be one of the last trials held in Germany dealing with the crimes of the Holocaust.

Imgard F had worked as a civilian employee in the commandant's office of Stutthof near what was then the Free City of Danzig, now Gdańsk in northern Poland, from June 1943 to April 1945, and therefore was found culpable for having assisted those in charge of the concentration camp in the systematic killing of inmates.

Because she was only 18 to 19 years old at the time of the crimes, the trial was held before a juvenile court in Itzehoe, a small town north of Hamburg.

The court's suspended sentence was in line with what the prosecution had requested. The defence had demanded acquittal.

During the Holocaust, the German Nazi regime systematically murdered about 6 million Jews in Europe between 1941 and 1945, a genocide that amounted to about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.