Accused of complicity in murders in more than 10,000 cases at the Stutthof concentration camp, Irmgard Furchner had fled the first day of the trial, before being found within hours.
From our correspondent in Berlin
The 96-year-old lady who had tried to escape her trial by fleeing her retirement home, then remained silent for a year in the dock, finally had to take responsibility for her Nazi past. Irmgard Furchner, a former young typist at the Stutthof extermination camp near Danzig, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence on Wednesday for complicity in crimes by the children’s court in Itzehoe, northern Germany .
The one who was a minor at the time of the events seventy-eight years later received the impassive verdict, her face masked by large dark glasses. She is the sixth defendant to be sentenced under a change in case law allowing German justice for ten years to prosecute the small hands of Nazi crimes: the secretary, the guard or the simple sentry of a camp.
From June 1943 to April 1945, Irmgard Furchner was assistant to the head of the Stutthof, Paul Werner Hoppe. Through it passed all the correspondence of the camp, including, probably, the orders of extermination. His defenders pleaded his ignorance and his subordinate role in the death machine. The person concerned remained silent before pronouncing these simple words: “I regret what I was at the time of Stutthof, I can not say more. »
The eight civil parties who have succeeded each other at the helm since October 2021 have described the hell that was Stutthof, where 10,505 people perished during Irmgard Furchner’s mission. “We were treated like animals” recently entrusted to the Figaro one of the survivors, Henri Zajdenwergier, who had to save his life at the age of 16, allowing him to work in the forest. “In winter, we could be woken up at 2 a.m. to go to the toilets, troughs in which we soaked our clothes in a detergent solution before wringing them out and putting them back on while still damp,” remembered the old man, whose thirteen members of the Jewish family perished at Auschwitz Birkenau.
SEE ALSO – “Very happy that this trial is taking place”: former Nazi camp guard sentenced in Germany
Read alsoGermany: at the Schütz trial, former SS master corporal, memory and denial
In the absence of ” hate “, Henri Zajdenwergier feels today only “contempt and disdain” for these accomplices of the genocide. Bruno Dey, 93, who was a guard at Stutthof, received a two-and-a-half-year suspended prison sentence. After being lenient and lax after the war with the major war criminals, German justice began, later on, to hunt down their surviving accomplices as an example. These steps coincide with the constantly renewed memory work of the German political class.
“We must never relax our vigilance when it comes to the memory of the Holocaust. Everyone must take a stand against all forms of anti-Semitism, no one must look the other way. Our state and our authorities must be relentless in prosecuting crimes,” urged the President of the Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, on Monday, while lighting, in front of the grandchildren of the Posner family, invited to Berlin, the nine-branch candlestick on the occasion of the Festival of Lights (Hanoukkah). Author in 1931 of an iconic photo superimposing the candelabra and the swastika, Rabbi Posner had fled Kiel two years later for Palestine.
Read alsoIn Germany, the Continental group lifts the veil on its Nazi past
From the court of Ludwigsburg, responsible for investigating the crimes of National Socialism, five new procedures have been transmitted to the regional prosecutor’s offices, likely to lead to trials, if the health of the defendants allows it. They implicate four men and a woman who raged in the camps of Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Neuengamme. Mostly guards, now aged 96 to 100. “Of course, we are working under time pressure, but it turns out that today we can still obtain new judgments, capable of correcting decades in which things did not go as they should have », welcomes Thomas Will, prosecutor of the court of Ludwigsburg.
A signal
If these trials allow the civil parties and the – rare – surviving victims to make their voices heard, they reflect the image of a two-speed justice with regard to Nazi crimes, criticize Holocaust historians. The trial with evanescent evidence of the mute Irmgard Furchner, which had started in an incredible way, could prove them right. “Everyone is punished according to their personal guilt, once it is proven that a criminal offense has been committed. People may think it’s best to leave these defendants alone, but as a matter of law, if a charge emerges, we have no choice but to conduct these trials, replies Thomas Will to Figaro. It is also perhaps a signal addressed to other culprits in other countries: one can never be sure of escaping prosecution and punishment. »