SWIMMING POOL / Portal
Germany: Irmgard Furchner, ex-secretary of a Nazi camp, convicted of aiding and abetting more than 10,000 murders
GERMANY — A 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence on Tuesday (December 20) in one of the last Nazi trials in Germany, sending an “important signal” to the last survivors of the crimes committed at the time.
Irmgard Furchner, who was accused of aiding and abetting murders in more than 10,000 cases at the Stutthof camp in what is now 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 primarily “symbolic” verdict.
The ninety-year-old in a white beret was present at the reading of the verdict, which she listened to from a wheelchair. She had not spoken before that court except during one of the very last hearings in December, where she expressed her regret. “I’m sorry for everything that happened. I regret having been in Stutthof at the time,” she said.
A statement that proves that “the process left its mark on her,” said Judge Dominik Gross on Tuesday, regretting his silence. Irmgard Furchner is the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for Nazi crimes.
Secretary to the camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe
She had fled on the day the hearings opened: she had left her accommodation in a nursing home in a taxi and had not appeared in court. The ninety-year-old was found a few hours later.
Irmgard Furchner, then 18 to 19 years old, was employed as a typist and secretary by the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe. According to her defense, the trial did not prove that she knew about the systematic murders in Stutthof. The argument was dismissed by the judges.
The court refuted the notion that she was, as she claimed, “a naïve young secretary” and held that “nothing” had been “hidden” from the defendant. She “had a relationship of trust” with the commander, the verdict goes on to say. By typing the latter’s letters, Irmgard Furchner had access to “confidential information”. Irmgard Furchner’s support for the Nazi machinery “consisted in writing down the commander’s orders,” explained Judge Gross.
Because of her age at the time of the crime, she was before a special court for juveniles. 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.
During the trial, several survivors witnessed their ordeal in an inhumane system designed to slowly kill them. This judgment is “an important signal” for them, assured Stefan Lode, the lawyer for three of these survivors living in the United States. “Our rule of law is investigating this case after so many decades and sending the signal out that murder is not statute-barred,” he added.
“Pervasive Smell of Corpse”
Most of the prisoners died of hunger, thirst, diseases such as typhoid and exhaustion. To execute the weakest, the camp had gas chambers and another place where they were shot in the neck.
“The smell of corpses was omnipresent in the immediate vicinity of the prisoners,” adds the judgment and considers it “inconceivable that the accused did not notice anything”. Her husband worked as an SS in the camp.
Seventy-seven years after the end of World War II, Germany continues to search for surviving former Nazi criminals, illustrating the increased, 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.
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