She flees at the beginning of the trial
Accused of being an accessory to murders in more than 11,000 cases in the Stutthof concentration camp in what is now Poland, she has been on trial in the Itzehoe District Court in northern Germany since September 2021. His lawyers asked for his acquittal on Tuesday. In their view, the evidence collected does not allow it to be said with certainty that the accused knew about the systematic murders in the Stutthof camp. On November 22, prosecutors had requested a two-year suspended sentence for the former secretary. The verdict is expected in two weeks, on the morning of December 20, according to a press release from the court.
The trial got off to an incredible start last September when the accused fled on the day the hearings opened. The ninety-year-old had not appeared in court, but left her accommodation in a retirement home in a taxi. She was found after a few hours.
On the same subject
In Lot-et-Garonne, an association recreates the horrors of Das Reich
HISTORY – La Mémoire en chemin in Lacapelle-Biron brings together the memorial associations of New Aquitaine and intends to provide pedagogical work and intergenerational transmission on the route in the region of the Nazi partition and an annual multicultural festival
The then 18 to 19-year-old Irmgard Furchner, who worked as a typist and secretary for the camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe, was of “essential importance” in the camp’s inhuman system, public prosecutor Maxi Wantzen claimed in her submissions on November 22. According to historians, “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war” were systematically murdered at Stutthof, a camp near the city of Danzig (then Danzig) where about 65,000 people lost their lives.
The jurisprudence of camp helpers
Seventy-seven years after the end of World War II, Germany’s search for surviving ex-Nazi criminals continues, demonstrating the increasing severity of its judiciary, albeit a belated realization of its victims. Very few of the women involved in Nazi horrors have been prosecuted since the end of the war.