A 97-year-old woman was sentenced Tuesday to two years in prison with a suspended sentence for her role in the Nazi Holocaust.
Imgard Furchner began working at the age of 18 as a secretary and stenographer at the Stutthof death camp in Poland. She was in field service between 1943 and 1945.
She has been tried for complicity in the death of ten thousand people, including Jews and Polish and Soviet prisoners, since last year. The judgment of the Itzehoe court corresponds to the request of the German public prosecutor, who had underlined the “exceptional historical significance” of the Irmgard Furchner trial, with a “symbolic” sentence.
Imgard Furchner is the first woman to be tried for crimes committed by the Nazi regime. Throughout the trial, the 97-year-old woman kept silent, having broken it in one of the last sessions only to regret everything that had happened.
“I’m very sorry about what happened. I’m sorry I was at Stutthof at the time,” he said.
Before the trial began, the woman tried to evade an arrest warrant and even ran away from the house where she lives for several hours.
At the time, Furchner was 18 years old and worked as a typist and secretary for camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe, occupying a “significant” position in the complex’s inhumane system, prosecutor Maxi Wantzen said during the trial.
The lawyers sought an acquittal, arguing that it had not been proven that the former secretary had knowledge of the murders at Stutthof.
Due to her age at the time of the crimes, Irmgard Furchner was tried before a special juvenile court.
At Stutthof, a concentration camp located near Gdansk (Danzig at the time), an estimated 65,000 people were systematically murdered, including Jewish prisoners, Polish resistance elements, and Soviet prisoners of war.
During the trial, several survivors gave their testimony, believing, according to the prosecutor, that they “had a duty to speak, even if they had to overcome pain to do so.”
Prisoners lived in inhumane conditions designed to make them die slowly.
Most of the prisoners died of hunger, thirst, diseases such as typhus, and exhaustion from hard work.
In order to execute prisoners considered physically “weaker”, the camp had gas chambers.
According to the prosecutor, the crimes committed during Nazism would not have been possible without the bureaucratic system of which Furchner was a part, “enjoying the confidence of the commander and maintaining access to all documents considered confidential.”
World War II (1939-1945) ended 77 years ago, but Germany continues to search for surviving ex-Nazi criminals to stand trial.
Very few women involved in Nazi crimes were prosecuted after 1945: Traudl Junge, Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, was never prosecuted and died in 2002.
The case law following the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp, to five years in prison, now allows any employee of the death complexes to be charged with complicity in thousands of murders: from the guard to the accountant .
Last June, a 101-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (north of Berlin) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Source: TSF
