A 97-year-old former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp has been sentenced to two years in prison in one of Germany’s last Holocaust-related cases.
Irmgard Furchner, accused of complicity in the deaths of more than ten thousand people in the Stutthof concentration camp, currently on Polish territory, was tried in September 2021 in the court of Itzehoe, in northern Germany.
The sentence follows the request of the German public prosecutor, who had underlined the “exceptional historical significance” of the Irmgard Furchner trial with a “symbolic” sentence.
The Defendant was present when the verdict was pronounced, which she heard sitting in a wheelchair.
He never spoke during the trial, except at one of the last hearings this month, when he regretted the facts.
“I’m really sorry about what happened. I’m sorry I was in Stutthof at the time,” he said.
Irmgard Furchner is the first woman to be tried in Germany in recent decades for crimes committed by the Nazi regime, in power in Germany between 1933 and 1945.
The former secretary had tried to escape trial after leaving the nursing home where she lives on the day the hearings started and was found a few hours later.
Furchner was 18 years old at the time and worked as a typist and secretary to the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe.
Lawyers asked for an acquittal, arguing that it had not been proven that the former secretary was aware of the murders in Stutthof.
Because of her age at the time of the crimes, Irmgard Furchner was tried in a special juvenile court.
In Stutthof, a concentration camp near Gdansk (then Danzig), 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 evidence, believing, according to the prosecution, that “they had a duty to speak, even if it required them to overcome pain”.
Prisoners lived in inhumane conditions designed to allow them to slowly die.
Most of the prisoners died of hunger, thirst, diseases such as typhus and exhaustion from work. forced. To execute prisoners considered physically “weaker”, the camp had gas chambers.
According to the prosecution, 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 former Nazi criminals who are still alive to bring them to justice.
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.
Jurisprudence following the 2011 sentencing of John Demjanjuk, a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp, to five years in prison, currently 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 Sachsenhausen concentration camp (north of Berlin) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Source: DN
