An unidentified 95-year-old German woman has been charged with 10,000 counts of accessory to murder for her role at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
German prosecutors say she actually helped run the camp in northern Poland for two years while serving as a secretary to its commander.
Her indictment makes her one of the oldest people ever charged with Nazi-era war crimes.
Senior Public Prosecutor Peter Müller-Rakow said in a statement to NPR that the woman helped officials carry out “the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners” — along with Polish partisans and Russian prisoners of war.
She claims she didn't know about the atrocities at the camp at the time, and only learned about them after the war.
“It’s a real milestone in judicial accountability,” Onur Özata, a lawyer representing survivors in a previous trial of a former camp secretary, told The New York Times. “The fact that a secretary in this system, a bureaucratic cog, can be brought to justice is something new.”
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