Originally Posted by Trollheart

I take your points OH (I may give them back but I'm short on points at the moment so bear with me), however I think it does have to be taken into account that the woman is now so very old and more to the point - she was a frigging secretary! Likelihood is that, yes, she typed up reports on so many thousands killed today etc, but for her it was just a job. Now I'm not going to advance the tired old defence "I was just following orders", which I never accept anyway. But as you yourself pointed out in another thread, or maybe this one, not sure - we'd all be collaborators in Nazi Germany. And if you're a girl of 21 and you're offered what might be seen as a plum post as secretary to the commandant of a concentration camp, would you refuse it? If you did, would you not bring suspicion upon yourself? Why is she turning the job down? Do we need to explore her loyalties, her family, her friends?

And at that age, right or wrong, 21 is just a kid. No 21-year-old German girl is going to be politically aware enough to know what she's doing is wrong. And is it wrong anyway? She's literally a pen-pusher: should she be held responsible because she had a job in a death factory? How much do we know about how much she knew about what went on?

I know it's hard to balance, but I just don't see the point. It's petty (in that sense) revenge. Different with Eichmann. Yes, he was in his eighties when hanged but he was a big wheel and personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. BIG difference.