A former secretary who worked for a Nazi concentration camp commander was found guilty of complicity in the killing of more than 10,505 people.

Irmgard Forschner, 97, learned to type as a teenager at Stutthof from 1943 to 1945.

Forschner, one of the few women to be tried for Nazi crimes decades ago, was given a suspended two-year prison sentence.

Although she was a civilian worker, the judge agreed that she was fully aware of what was going on in the camp.

Some 65,000 people are believed to have died in appalling conditions at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners, Gentile Poles, and captured Soviet soldiers. As Forschner was only 18 or 19 at the time, she was tried in a special juvenile court.

In Stutthof, near the present-day Polish city of Gdańsk, a variety of methods were used to kill detainees, and thousands died in the gas chambers there starting in June 1944.

The court in Itzehoe, in northern Germany, heard testimonies from camp survivors, some of whom died during the trial.

When the trial began in September last year 2021, Irmgard Forschner fled her retirement home and was eventually found by police on a Hamburg street.

The commandant of the Stutthof camp, Paul Werner Hoppe, was imprisoned in 1955 for being an accessory to murder and released five years later.

A series of trials have been launched in Germany since 2011, following the conviction of former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, which set a precedent that the fact that a suspect was a guard could be considered sufficient evidence to prove complicity.

This ruling also opened the door to the prosecution of the civilian worker Forschner, because she was working directly with the camp commandant and dealing with the correspondence surrounding the Stutthof detainees.

It took 40 days for the woman to break her silence at the trial, when she told the court, "I am sorry for everything that happened." "I regret that I was in Stutthof at that time, that's all I can say," she said.

Her defense lawyers argued that she should be acquitted because of doubts about what she knew, as she was one of several clerks in Commander Hobby's office.

Historian Stefan Hordler played a key role in the trial, accompanying two judges on a visit to the campsite. It became clear from the visit that Forchner was able to see some of the worst conditions in the camp from the commandant's office.

The historian told the court that 27 transports carrying 48,000 people arrived at Stutthof between June and October 1944, after the Nazis decided to expand the camp and accelerate mass killings using Zyklon B gas.

Hordler described Commandant Hoppe's office as the "nerve center" for everything that happened in Stutthof.

Two more cases have been brought to court in recent years, alleging Nazi crimes at Stutthof.