Irmgard Furchner, who worked as a typist and secretary to the Stutthof concentration camp commandant, was charged with more than 10,000 counts of aiding and abetting murder. She is the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for Nazi crimes.
A 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary was sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence in one of the last Nazi trials in Germany on Tuesday.
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.
escape attempt
The 90-year-old in the white cap was present at the verdict, which she listened to from a wheelchair.
She had not spoken before the court except during one of the most recent hearings in December, where she expressed regret. “I’m sorry for everything that happened. I regret being in Stutthof back then,” she said.
Irmgard Furchner is the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for Nazi crimes.
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.
Typist for the camp commandant
The then 18 to 19-year-old Irmgard Furchner, who worked as a typist and secretary for the camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe, was of “essential importance” in the camp’s inhuman system, according to the public prosecutor’s office Maxi Wantzen in his requisitions.
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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.
In Stutthof, a camp near Danzig (then Danzig) where around 65,000 people perished, “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.
Surviving Nazi criminals were sought
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the crimes committed would not have been possible without the office system in which Irmgard 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.
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.
Original article published on BFMTV.com
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