A 97-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary has appealed her conviction for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people, a German court said on Wednesday.
Irmgard Furchner was the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for Nazi-era crimes.
Last week, Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence for his role in what prosecutors called the “cruel and malicious murder” of prisoners at Stutthof concentration camp in Poland.
But his defense, as well as a co-plaintiff, “quickly filed an appeal to the Federal Supreme Court against the judgment of the Itzehoe Regional Court,” a spokeswoman for the court said in a statement.
The legal challenge can only raise the question of whether the sentence was based on violation of the law, the spokeswoman said.
The Supreme Court will examine whether “proceedings were properly conducted and substantive law was properly applied,” the court spokeswoman said, adding that evidence would not be collected again. Pending the appeal, the verdict is not legally binding, he added.
Furchner apologized as the trial drew to a close, telling the court he was “sorry about everything that happened”.
Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner handled the correspondence of the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, while her husband was a fellow SS officer at the concentration camp.
An estimated 65,000 people died in the camp near present-day Gdansk, including “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war,” prosecutors said.
In handing down the verdict, chairman Dominik Gross said that “nothing that happened in Stutthof was hidden” from Fruchner and that the defendant was aware of the “extremely bad conditions for the prisoners”.
Although the poor concentration camp conditions and hard work claimed most of their lives, the Nazis also operated gas chambers and shooting facilities to exterminate hundreds of people deemed unfit for work.
Furchner tried to flee the nursing home where she lives to escape the trial, which was due to start last September, but after a few hours she was detained by police in the neighboring city of Hamburg.
The defendant was a teenager when she committed her crimes and was therefore tried by a juvenile court.
77 years later, time is running out to bring Holocaust-related criminals to justice. In recent years, several cases have been dropped because the accused died or was physically unable to stand trial.
The 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk on the grounds that he was part of Hitler’s killing machine set a legal precedent and paved the way for multiple lawsuits.
Source: DN
