Former female Nazi camp secretary, 96, arrested after going on the run from nursing home hours before Holocaust trial

A FORMER female Nazi camp secretary who went on the run from her nursing home just hours before she was due to go on trial has been arrested.

Irmgard Furchner, 96, is accused of playing a part in the murder of more than 11,000 prisoners but fled her care home in a taxi and was last seen boarding a subway train in Germany.

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Judge Dominic Gros announced her trial was delayed and then revealed she had gone on the run, with police examining CCTV of the station to see if they could pick her up.

But this afternoon, Furchner was arrested by cops as she walked along Langenhorner Chaussee, a road leading into Hamburg.

Furchner worked at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk, Poland, during World War Two.

She is currently living in a care facility in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, but has been under investigation for several years and is fully aware of what is going on.

Staff describe the pensioner as ''one of our most sprightly residents''.

Prosecutors said Furchner was accused of having assisted those responsible at the concentration camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners.

She worked as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander
Paul Werne-Hoppe between June 1943 and April 1945.

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Besides being charged with aiding and abetting 11,412 murders, she is also accused of complicity in 18 attempted murders.

Due to her age at the time of the allegations, Furchner, who lives in a
retirement home in Pinneburg, near Hamburg, will appear before a juvenile court.

Prosecutors began their investigation in 2016 and have questioned
Holocaust survivors in Israel and the US as part of their probe.

Documents are said to have been seized from her room at the care home
and she has admitted working at the camp where more than 65,000 people died.

At the end of World War Two, Furchner was questioned by Allied
investigators about Hoppe and described him as a ''conscientious
worker'' but she had no knowledge of any deaths at the camp.

Hoppe fled to Switzerland in 1945 and worked as a gardener under a new
identity but was eventually arrested in 1953 and later tried as an
accessory to murder. He was given nine years and died in 1974 aged 64.

Furchner had expressed her intention to avoid the trial earlier this month in a handwritten letter.

"Due to my age and physical limitations, I will not attend the court dates and ask the defense lawyer to represent me," she wrote to the Itzehoe regional court in a letter, as reported by Die Welt newspaper

"I would like to spare myself these embarrassments and not make myself the mockery of humanity."

Furchner is now due in court for her trial on October 19.