Irmgard Furchner, on December 20, 2022 at the Itzehoe District Court. CHRISTIAN CHARISIUS / AP
It was one of the last Nazi trials in Germany. A 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary was sentenced to two years’ probation on Tuesday, December 20. Irmgard Furchner, who was accused of aiding and abetting murders in more than 10,000 counts at the Stutthof concentration camp in present-day Poland, has been on trial in the Itzehoe District Court in northern Germany since September 2021.
This conviction corresponds to the demands of the public prosecutor’s office, which had underlined the “extraordinary historical importance” of this process with a judgment of a primarily “symbolic” nature. The 90-year-old in the white cap was present at the verdict, which she listened to from a wheelchair. She had not spoken in court except during a very recent hearing in December, where she expressed regret. “I’m sorry for everything that happened. I regret having been in Stutthof at the time,” she said.
Irmgard Furchner is the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for crimes committed by National Socialism. She had attempted to escape her trial by fleeing the day the hearings opened. She had left her accommodation in a nursing home in a taxi, but had not appeared in court. She was found a few hours later.
The then 18- to 19-year-old Ms. Furchner, who worked as a typist and secretary for the camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe, had a position of “essential importance” in the inhuman system of the camp, according to the public prosecutor’s office Maxi Wantzen in his requirements.
Her lawyers had demanded her acquittal because she had not been proven to have any knowledge of the systematic murders in Stutthof. Irmgard Furchner was tried in a special juvenile court because of her age at the time of the events.
Also read: Germany: Two-year suspended sentence against a former secretary of a concentration camp
Access to all documents considered confidential
In Stutthof, camp near Danzig [Dantzig à l’époque] where around 65,000 people died, “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war” were systematically murdered. Throughout the trial, several survivors testified, believing, according to prosecutors, that “it was their duty to speak, even if it meant working through their pain.”
They lived in catastrophic conditions designed to slowly kill them. Most inmates died of starvation, thirst, diseases such as typhus, and exhaustion from forced labor. To execute the weakest, the camp had gas chambers and another location, typical of Nazi Germany, where the victim was shot in the neck under the pretense of a medical examination.
According to the public prosecutor, the crimes committed would not have been possible without the office system in which Ms. Furchner was one of the cogs. She enjoyed the commander’s trust and had access to all documents considered confidential.
Seventy-seven years after the end of World War II, Germany continues to search for ex-Nazi criminals still alive, illustrating the increasing, if belated, severity of its justice system. Very few women involved in Nazi crimes were prosecuted. Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, Traudl Junge, was never disturbed until her death in 2002.
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The jurisprudence of the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor camp in 1943, to five years in prison now makes it possible to prosecute any helper at a concentration camp for aiding and abetting tens of thousands of assassination attempts. In June, a 101-year-old former guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp (north of Berlin) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Also read: In Germany, five years in prison for the former security guard accused of Nazi crimes in the Sachsenhausen camp