A 96-Year-Old Who Worked At A Nazi Camp Has Been Caught After Skipping Her Trial Updated September 30, 2021 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 WORLD

A 96-Year-Old Who Worked At A Nazi Camp Has Been Caught After Skipping Her Trial

Updated September 30, 202110:54 AM ET 

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A judicial officer looks at his watch prior to a trial against a 96-year-old former secretary for the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp at the court room in Itzehoe, Germany on Thursday. The woman who is charged of more than 11,000 counts of accessory to murder has not appeared and is wanted by warrant.

Markus Schreiber/AP

ITZEHOE, Germany — A former secretary for the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp skipped the planned start Thursday of her trial in Germany on more than 11,000 counts of accessory to murder, officials said. She was picked up several hours later after the court issued an arrest warrant.

The 96-year-old woman left her home near Hamburg in a taxi on Thursday morning, a few hours before proceedings were due to start at the state court in Itzehoe, court spokesperson Frederike Milhoffer said.

The court issued the warrant and delayed the reading of the indictment until the next scheduled hearing on Oct. 19 because that couldn't be done in the defendant's absence.

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The accused woman previously had "announced that she didn't want to come" to court, but the statement did not provide sufficient grounds for detaining her ahead of the trial, Milhoffer said. Given the woman's age and condition, she had not been expected "actively to evade the trial," Milhoffer added.

The court said Thursday afternoon that the defendant had been caught and police would bring her to the court, German news agency dpa reported. A doctor was to examine whether she was fit to be jailed before the court decides whether or not to put her in custody.

Prosecutors argue that the woman was part of the apparatus that helped the Nazi's Stutthof camp function during World War II more than 75 years ago.

The court said in a statement before the trial that the defendant allegedly "aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant's office."

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Despite her advanced age, the German woman was to be tried in juvenile court because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes. German media identified her as Irmgard Furchner.

Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's office in Jerusalem, told The Associated Press that "if she is healthy enough to flee, she is healthy enough to be incarcerated."

Her flight, he added, "should also affect the punishment."

The case against Furchner relies on German legal precedent established in cases over the past decade that anyone who helped Nazi death camps and concentration camps function can be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there, even without evidence of participation in a specific crime.

A defense lawyer told Der Spiegel magazine that the trial would center on whether the 96-year-old had knowledge of the atrocities that happened at the camp.

"My client worked in the midst of SS men who were experienced in violence — however, does that mean she shared their state of knowledge? That is not necessarily obvious," lawyer Wolf Molkentin said.

According to other media reports, Furchner was questioned as a witness during past Nazi trials and said at the time that the former SS commandant of Stutthof, Paul Werner Hoppe, dictated daily letters and radio messages to her.

Furchner testified she was not aware of the killings that occurred at the camp while she worked there, dpa reported.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig — now the Polish city of Gdansk — Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called "work education camp" where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp, along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah's Witnesses.

More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, or being shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure, or were put to death in a gas chamber.

Obesity Rates Rise During Pandemic, Fueled By Stress, Job Loss, Sedentary Lifestyle September 29, 2021 Yuki Noguchi

 PUBLIC HEALTH

Obesity Rates Rise During Pandemic, Fueled By Stress, Job Loss, Sedentary Lifestyle

September 29, 20211:01 PM ET

YUKI NOGUCHI

Twitter

A Planet Fitness employee cleans equipment before a gym's reopening in March in Inglewood, Calif., after being closed due to COVID-19. Reduced access to recreation likely has contributed to weight gain during the pandemic.

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

It is official: The pandemic's effect on America's waistline has been rough.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed 16 states now have obesity rates of 35% or higher. That's an increase of four states — Delaware, Iowa, Ohio and Texas — in just a year.

The findings confirm what several recent research studies have found: Many Americans have gained significant weight since the COVID-19 crisis started, likely fueled by an increase in sedentary behavior, stress and troubles such as job and income loss that make healthy eating harder.

And those rates are rising faster among racial minorities.

"Obesity continues to be a significant public health crisis," says Nadine Gracia, a physician and president and CEO of Trust for America's Health, a health policy group that recently analyzed the CDC's 2020 data. And growth in childhood obesity, she says, projects a worsening trend.

The pandemic only exacerbated a problem that was already quickly accelerating in the last decade. In 2011, not a single state had reached the threshold of 35% obesity. Now, among the 16 at that level, a handful are close to 40%. The rates are higher in the South and Midwest.

Stress and rising weight

The latest CDC data is based on a survey of people self-reporting their own height and weight, so if anything, the new data likely understates the problem, says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, a leading obesity researcher at Harvard Medical School.

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"When patients are reporting or individuals are reporting their weight, they tend to underreport. So I think that this report will under-capture, actually, the degree of obesity in the U.S.," she says.

Stanford argues that obesity's growing prevalence has not met with adequate recognition that it is a disease. And because it goes largely unrecognized or untreated, it does not surprise her it continues to increase — especially during difficult times such as the last year and half of the pandemic and its economic and social fallout.

"When we look at factors that play a role in rising obesity, we know stress is one of them," she says.

She says stress doesn't just affect exercise and eating patterns. It also prompts the body to store more fat. During the pandemic, other factors, including food insecurity and reduced access to recreation made it more likely that everyone from children to older adults would gain weight.

Other research supports the finding that obesity rates increased in the pandemic. A March survey from the American Psychological Association found 42% of Americans said they had gained more weight than intended, 29 pounds on average. A recent study that gathered data from pediatric health records found a trend of weight gain among children, especially those ages 5 to 11. Among that age group, overweight or obesity increased from 36.2% to 45.7% during the pandemic.

The pandemic revealed how the growth in obesity threatens the health of both individuals and the health care system. It makes people more vulnerable to hospitalization and death from COVID-19. At the same time, the pandemic worsened many of the social and economic factors that cause obesity, too. Job or income loss, for example, often means families cannot afford healthier food options.

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Gracia of Trust for America's Health says with obesity comes the threat of diabetes, heart or kidney disease, and cancer. That adds to an enormous financial cost.

"We spend about $149 billion a year on health care costs that are obesity-related," she says.

Finding solutions to racial inequities

There are big racial differences in the impact of obesity: A separate CDC survey from 2017-2018 showed nearly half of Black people and 57% of Black women have obesity. In the Latino population, the rate is nearly 45%; among white adults, 42%. Asian adults had the lowest rate at 17%.

More minority families shouldered the economic brunt of the pandemic, says Dr. Elena Rios, president and CEO of the National Hispanic Medical Association, because they represent a greater share of the low-wage or essential workforce.

"I mean, there's just so much pressure on low-income families," she says. "Everybody has to pitch in and do something, [so] they don't take care of their health."

Gracia says larger investments in healthier school meals and greater access to recreation are necessary to combat the growing problem. Minority communities especially need greater access to health insurance and medical care.

"Being able to access those services is important to receiving preventative services, counseling and supports to address obesity," she says.

There are other community factors Rios points to as well: fewer local options for healthy food and less access to health insurance and care. And these factors can have a dire effect on people's health.

"Our communities don't get the messages that you're going to have diabetes earlier, you're going to have heart disease earlier in your life and by the time you're in your 30s and 40s, you're going to be on dialysis. That's the trend that's happening in our communities," she says.

Given the stigma around obesity, crafting messages that resonate is not easy, says Tammy Boyd, chief policy officer of the Black Women's Health Imperative.

"It's a very delicate balance," she says, because using words such as "weight" easily sounds stigmatizing. But at the same time, Boyd says, the community needs to understand obesity as a critical health and wellness issue.

For Boyd, one of the most promising potential remedies is medication. New classes of drugs are proving both safer and more effective than what's been on the market.

Most insurance — including Medicare — does not cover them. Congress is considering a bill allowing Medicare to cover obesity drugs and behavioral counseling. Boyd says if the legislation passes, many other insurers would likely follow. And that might help curb some of the disturbing trend lines.

• overweight
• health disparities
• obesity