In American-occupied Germany, media-blitzed show trials still take place against those people who it is alleged committed crimes during ‘Nazism’. Those arrested and dragged before the courts are invariably those who were teenage conscripts at the time.

Indeed, this status leaves one open to be charged with war crimes that were not the responsibility of the Reich government but of the Allied policy. A case in point is the semi-senile 97-year-old Irmgard Fürchner. The then teenage conscript worked as a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp.

Desperate to spend her final days on earth in peace at her home and avoid a prison term during which she would of course die in a squalid cell, she stated that she was ‘sorry that everything happened like this.’

The press reports: ‘In Germany, the trial of the former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, 97-year-old Irmgard Fürchner, is underway. She worked there from June 1943 to April 1945. She is accused of being involved in the death of more than 10,000 prisoners.’

According to American-German law, any person who worked for a concentration camp can be called to account, even if he or she was not on the spot as it were: a teenager who served food in a mess, the young disabled lad who cleaned the latrines, whatever, all are charged as a war criminal.

As the author of the article notes, Fürchner is the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for crimes of the ‘Nazi’ era.

Michael Walsh, historian and journalist smiles: ‘On every occasion, media finds it necessary to use the term ‘Nazi’ instead of the correct term, ‘National Socialist. I assume,’ he says, ‘that today’s journalists for the correct longer term too time-consuming and too difficult to spell. It is noted that pseudo-journalists never refer to pre-1990 Russians as ‘commies.’

The poor old dear even at 97 years of age is described by media hacks as the ‘Secretary of Evil’. At the same time, she has a special status (teenage) in the case, since she was not 21 years old while working in the camp.

Although the court established that she was in daily contact with the camp commandant, she maintained that she had no knowledge of the killings (which are anyway the outpourings of the victor’s propaganda). The prosecutor wants two years in prison for her.

This court case is a good illustration of the current policy of Germany regarding the Holocaust. So, in June, the court sentenced 101-year-old Joseph Schutz to five years in prison He is unlikely to go to prison while the appeal hearings are underway. In 2011, John Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison for complicity in the executions in Sobibor.

Here is the ‘Never Again’ crunch: The author of the article notes that this process is especially important against the background of the growing manifestations of anti-Semitism in the world. The same rapper Kanye West praises Hitler, and in New York, the number of crimes motivated by anti-Semitism has grown by 125% over the year, writes the New York Post.