Germany convicts 97-year-old woman of accessory to murder while Nazi concentration camp secretary

A German court has convicted a 97-year-old woman of being an accessory to murder, for her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during the Second World War.

Irmgard Furchner was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp function.

The Itzehoe state court in northern Germany gave her a two-year suspended sentence, German news agency dpa reported.

She was alleged to have “aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office”.

The verdict and sentence were in line with prosecutors’ demands.

Defence lawyers had asked for her to be acquitted, saying the evidence had not shown beyond doubt that Furchner knew about the systematic killings at the camp, meaning there was no proof of intent as required for criminal liability.

In her closing statement, Furchner said she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been at Stutthof at the time.

She was tried in a juvenile court because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes.

The defendant tried to skip the start of her trial in September 2021 but was later picked up by police and placed in detention for several days.

Prosecutors in Itzehoe said during the proceedings that Furchner’s trial may be the last of its kind.

However, a special federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes says another five cases are currently pending with prosecutors in various parts of Germany, where charges of murder and accessory to murder are not subject to a statute of limitations.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a Nazi so-called “work education camp” where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.