Irmgard Furchner was 18 when she began working at Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland as secretary to its commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe.

She is being tried in a juvenile court to reflect her age at the time of the alleged crimes.

She had attempted to escape the trial last month, leaving her retirement home in Quickborn and travelling to the outskirts of Hamburg. She was arrested, however, and placed in police custody before being fitted with an electronic tag.

Ms Furchner dealt with transport lists of detainees destined for Auschwitz as well as the dictation of Hoppe’s orders, the prosecution said. She would have “been aware of all happenings” at Stutthof, the court heard.

Wolfgang Molkentin, defending, said Ms Furchner resented being treated in the same bracket as high-ranking officials and that she distanced herself from attempts on the far-right to treat her as a hero.

Detainees at the camp were sometimes tricked into believing their heights were being measured when they were simply to be shot by SS men disguised as doctors. Others were gassed with Zyklon B. Eyewitnesses said they screamed in agony and clawed at their skin and hair due to the incredible pain.

“Irmgard Furchner does not deny the crimes of the Shoah,” Mr Molkentin told the court. “Neither does she deny the terrible acts that took place as has once again been made clear to us all in the indictment. She simply rejects the charge around which this trial ultimately revolves, that she was personally guilty of a crime.”

Christoph Rückel, for the co-plaintiffs from America, France and Austria, asked the court to reconsider his request for a visit to the memorial site at Stutthof.

“This source of knowledge cannot really be replaced by other means of evidence,” he said.

“A visual inspection of the [site] by the trial participants would allow them to see that the defendant would have – both on her daily route to work and from her view from the building of the commander where she had her office … had to observe the existence of a gas chamber, a crematorium, a gallows, and the omnipresent daily inhumane treatment of the detainees.”

He added: “Those I am representing here are just as old as Irmgard Furchner.

“They need closure. As one of them, who has since died, wrote to me: ‘I haven’t come to the finishing line yet’.”