A 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary was given a suspended two-year prison sentence on Tuesday in one of Germany’s last Nazi-era trials.
Irmgard Furchner, accused of complicity in murders in more than 10,000 cases in the Stutthof concentration camp, in present-day Poland, had been on trial since September 2021 before the Itzehoe Court in northern Germany.
This sentence complies with the requirements of the prosecution, which had underlined the “exceptional historical significance” of this trial, with a sentence of a fundamentally “symbolic” nature.
attempt to escape
The nonagenarian, dressed in a white cap, was present at the pronouncement of the sentence that she heard sitting in her wheelchair.
She had not spoken before the Court, except during one of the last hearings, in December, where she expressed her regret. “I’m sorry for everything that happened. I’m sorry I was at Stutthof at the time,” she said.
Irmgard Furchner is the first woman to be tried in Germany in decades for crimes committed under the Nazis.
She had tried to escape her trial by running away on the opening day of the hearings. She had left her nursing home accommodation in a taxi, but she had not appeared in court. She was found a few hours later.
Camp Commandant’s Typist
Aged 18 to 19 at the time, Irmgard Furchner, who worked as a typist and secretary for camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe, held a position of “essential importance” in the camp’s inhumane system, prosecutor Maxi Wantzen said in his requisitions.
His lawyers had asked for his acquittal, considering that it had not been proven that he had knowledge of the systematic murders in Stutthof. Due to her age at the time of the events, Irmgard Furchner was tried before a special juvenile court.
At Stutthof, a camp near Gdansk (Dantzig at the time) where approximately 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 the prosecutor, that “it was their duty to speak, even if they had to overcome pain to do so.”
They lived in disastrous conditions designed to kill them slowly. Most of the inmates died of hunger, thirst, diseases such as typhus, and exhaustion from forced labor.
To execute the weakest, the camp had gas chambers and another place typical of Nazi Germany, where the victim was shot in the neck under the pretext of a medical examination.
Wanted for living Nazi criminals
According to the prosecutor, the crimes committed would not have been possible without the trade system of which Irmgard Furchner was one of the cogs. She enjoyed the confidence of the commander and had access to all the 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 greater, if belated, severity of its justice.
Very few women implicated in Nazi crimes were prosecuted. Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, Traudl Junge, was never molested until her death in 2002.
The jurisprudence of the sentence in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard of the Sobibor camp in 1943, to five years in prison, now allows to prosecute for complicity in tens of thousands of murders any auxiliary of a concentration camp, from guard to accountant . .
In June, a 101-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (north of Berlin) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Source: BFM TV
