Germany have convicted a 97-year-old Nazi for having contributed to the murder of over 11,000 people. (Read More Here).
She worked at a Nazi concentration camp in World War Two when she was 18. — A 97-year-old woman who worked as a secretary at a Nazi concentration camp was convicted by a German court Tuesday of being an accessory to the murder of more than 10,000 people.
In what could be the last trial of its kind, Irmgard Furchner — dubbed the “secretary of evil” by German media — was handed a two-year suspended sentence for helping the Stutthof concentration camp to function during World War II.
The trial, which was briefly delayed when Furchner went on the run by fleeing in a taxi, took place in juvenile court because she was 18 and 19 years old when she worked as a secretary for the camp’s SS commander.
At Stutthof, located near the modern-day Polish city of Gdansk, a variety of methods was used to murder detainees and thousands died in gas chambers there from June 1944.
The court at Itzehoe in northern Germany heard from survivors of the camp, some of whom have died during the trial.
When the trial began in September 2021, Irmgard Furchner went on the run from her retirement home and was eventually found by police on a street in Hamburg.
Stutthof commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe was jailed in 1955 for being an accessory to murder and he was released five years later.
A series of prosecutions have taken place in Germany since 2011, after the conviction of former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk set the precedent that being a guard was sufficient evidence to prove complicity.
That ruling also meant that civilian worker Furchner could stand trial, as she worked directly to the camp commander, dealing with correspondence surrounding Stutthof detainees.
It took 40 days for her to break her silence in the trial, when she told the court “I’m sorry about everything that happened”.
“I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time – that’s all I can say,” she said.
Her defence lawyers argued she should be acquitted because of doubts surrounding what she knew, as she was one of several typists in Hoppe’s office.
After the war, Furchner married an SS squad leader called Heinz Furchstam whom she probably met at the camp.
She went on to work as an administrative worker in a small town in northern Germany. Her husband died in 1972. Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence by the court in the northern town of Itzehoe early Tuesday for being an accessory to 10,505 counts of murder and five counts of attempted murder, a spokesman for the court confirmed to NBC News in an email.
That’s in line with what prosecutors had sought, while survivors of the death camp and relatives of victims who appeared as joint plaintiffs also said that it was not in their interest for the 97-year-old to serve any time in prison.
Furchner was charged with “aiding those in a position of responsibility at the former Stutthof concentration camp with the systematic killing of those imprisoned there, due to her work as a shorthand typist/secretary in the Camp Commandant’s Office between June 1943 and April 1945,” according to a court press release.
Her defense lawyer had asked for her to be acquitted, arguing that while it was clear that thousands of people were killed in Stutthof, the evidence did not show beyond doubt that Furchner knew about the systematic killing at the concentration camp, according to a press release by the court. In Germany proof of intent is required for criminal liability.
Earlier this month, Furchner broke her silence and delivered unexpected final remarks.
She said that she was sorry for what had happened, that she regretted that she had been at Stutthof at the time and that she had nothing left to say. Previously, Furchner had attended but remained silent throughout 14 months of court hearings.
Holocaust survivors and their representatives had begged Furchner to speak up during the trial, according to German media reports.
Historian Stefan Hördler played a key role in the trial, accompanying two judges on a visit to the site of the camp.
It became clear from the visit that Furchner was able to see some of the worst conditions at the camp from the commandant’s office.
The historian told the trial that 27 transports carrying 48,000 people arrived at Stutthof between June and October 1944, after the Nazis decided to expand the camp and speed up mass murder with the use of Zyklon B gas.
Mr Hördler described Hoppe’s office as the “nerve centre” for everything that went on at Stutthof.
During his evidence he read out evidence provided by Furchner’s husband in 1954 when he said: “At the Stutthof camp people were gassed. The staff at the commandant’s HQ talked about it.”
Presiding judge Dominik Gross said it was “beyond imagination” that Furchner could not have noticed the smoke and stench of mass killing: “The defendant could have quit at any time.”
Camp survivor Josef Salomonovic, who travelled to the court to give evidence at the trial, was only six when his father was murdered by lethal injection at Stutthof in September 1944.
“She’s indirectly guilty,” he told reporters at the court last December, “even if she just sat in the office and put her stamp on my father’s death certificate.”
Another Stutthof survivor, Manfred Goldberg, said his only disappointment was in the nature of the sentence.
“It’s a foregone conclusion that a 97-year-old would not be made to serve a sentence in prison – so it could only be a symbolic sentence,” he told the BBC.
“But the length should be made to reflect the extraordinary barbarity of being found to be complicit in the murder of more than 10,000 people.”
Furchner went on the run weeks before her trial was due to begin, but was found by authorities after several hours. Proceedings eventually began late last year.
Tens of thousands of people were held in brutal conditions at the Stutthof camp, and more than 60,000 died there, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Stutthof mainly held non-Jewish Poles, as well as a large number of Jews from the Polish cities of Warsaw and Bialystok and from Nazi-occupied Baltic states, according to the museum.
Germany has raced to bring the perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in recent years, before it is too late. But experts say that only a small proportion of those involved ever faced a court
Furchner was wheeled into court wearing a cream-coloured winter coat and beret, and with a blanket over her lap. Her defence lawyer would not comment when asked by reporters how she took the ruling.
In a closing statement at the trial earlier this month, Furchner said she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been in Stutthof at the time.
“Only a secretary, you might say, but the role that even a secretary had back then in the bureaucracy of a (concentration camp) is a significant one,” Wantzen said.
Furchner worked at Stutthof, between 1943 and 1945 and was sentenced under juvenile law because she was aged between 18 and 19 at the time.
The start of Furchner’s trial was delayed in September 2021 when she briefly went on the run. She was caught hours after failing to turn up in court.
She is the latest in a series of nonagenarians to have been charged with Holocaust crimes in what is seen as a rush by prosecutors to seize the final opportunity to enact justice for the victims of some of the worst mass killings in history.
The defendant tried to skip the start of her trial in September 2021 but was later picked up by police and placed in detention for several days.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that “today’s verdict is the best that could be achieved, given the fact that she was tried in a juvenile court.”
Prosecutors in Itzehoe said during the proceedings that Furchner’s trial may be the last of its kind. However, a special federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes says another five cases are currently pending with prosecutors in various parts of Germany, where charges of murder and accessory to murder aren’t subject to a statute of limitations.
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