It was one of the last Nazi-era trials in Germany. A 97-year-old former secretary of a concentration camp was given a two-year suspended prison sentence on Tuesday December 20. Irmgard Furchner, accused of complicity in murders in more than 10,000 cases at the Stutthof concentration camp, in present-day Poland, had been on trial since September 2021 before the Court of Itzehoe, in northern Germany.
This condemnation is in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution which had underlined the “outstanding historical significance” of this trial, with a judgment of the character above all “symbolic”. The nonagenarian, wearing a white cap, was present at the pronouncement of the verdict which she listened to sitting in her wheelchair. She had not spoken to the court, except during one of the very last hearings, in December, where she had expressed regrets. “I’m sorry for everything that happened. I regret having been in Stutthof at that time”she said.
Irmgard Furchner is the first woman to be tried in Germany in decades for crimes committed under the Nazi regime. She had tried to escape her trial by fleeing on the day of the opening of the hearings. She had left her accommodation in a home for the elderly in a taxi, but had not appeared in court. She was found a few hours later.
Aged at the time of the facts from 18 to 19 years old, Mme Furchner, who worked as a typist and secretary to camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe, had a position “of essential significance” in the inhuman system of the camp, said the prosecutor Maxi Wantzen in her requisitions.
Her lawyers had demanded her acquittal, considering that it had not been proven that she had knowledge of the murders carried out systematically in Stutthof. Due to her age at the time of the events, Irmgard Furchner was tried before a special court for young people.
Access to all documents deemed confidential
In Stutthof, camp near Gdansk [Dantzig à l’époque] where about 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 their pain to do so”.
They lived in disastrous conditions designed to kill them slowly. Most of the inmates died of hunger, thirst, disease, 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 on the pretext of a medical examination.
According to the prosecutor, the crimes committed would not have been possible without the office system of which Ms.me Furchner was one of the cogs. She enjoyed the commander’s confidence and had access to all documents deemed confidential.
Seventy-seven years after the end of World War II, Germany continues to search for ex-Nazi criminals still alive, illustrating the increased, albeit belated, severity of its justice system. Very few women implicated in Nazi crimes were prosecuted. Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, Traudl Junge, was never bothered until her death in 2002.
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The case law of the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard of the Sobibor camp in 1943, to five years in prison, now makes it possible to prosecute for complicity in tens of thousands of assassinations any auxiliary of a camp of concentration, 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.