A former secretary of a Nazi camp was sentenced to two years in prison suspended for complicity in the massacre of ten thousand people

Irmgard Furchner, 97, is the first woman to be prosecuted in decades in Germany for Holocaust-era crimes. “I’m sorry for everything that happened,” she said. She had tried to escape in 2021

A German court on Tuesday sentenced a 97-year-old former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp to two years in prison with a suspended sentence, accused of complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people.

In one of the country’s latest Holocaust trials, Irmgard Furchner was tried for her alleged role in the “cruel and malicious murder” of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

The sentence conforms to the request of the prosecution, which underlined the “exceptional historical significance” of the process, with a mostly “symbolic” ruling.

The defendant, whose face is blurred in media photos by order of the court, was present when the verdict was delivered, sitting in a wheelchair.

She did not speak in court, except during one of the last hearings, in December, when she broke her silence. “I’m sorry for everything that happened,” she told the regional court in the northern city of Itzehoe.

She is the first woman to be prosecuted in decades in Germany for Nazi-era crimes.

Furchner attempted to escape when the procedure was scheduled to begin in September 2021, fleeing the nursing home where she lives and heading to a subway station.

She tried to evade police for several hours before being arrested in the nearby city of Hamburg, and she was detained for five days.
Her lawyers had called for her acquittal, saying the evidence presented during the trial “had not proven beyond a doubt” that this woman knew of the murders.

“Absolute Hell”

The defendant was a teenager when her alleged crimes were committed and, therefore, she was tried by a juvenile court.

An estimated 65,000 people died in the camp near present-day Gdansk, including “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Russian-Soviet prisoners of war,” prosecutors said.

Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner worked in the office of camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe.

As the case may be, Ella Furchner dictated the SS officer’s orders and carried his correspondence.

During the trial hearings, several survivors of the Stutthof camp revealed harrowing accounts of her suffering.

The prosecutor, Maxi Wantzen, appreciated the courage of the witnesses, many of whom also served as commanders, saying they had spoken of the “absolute hell” of the camp.

“They feel like it’s their duty, even though they had to invoke pain over and over again to do it,” she clarified.

Time is running out

The prosecutor told the judges that the defendant’s administrative work “ensured the proper functioning of the camp” and also gave her “knowledge of all the events in Stutthof.”

She also indicated that “life-threatening conditions” such as food and water shortages and the spread of deadly diseases, including typhus, were intentionally maintained and immediately apparent.

Although the appalling conditions of the camp and forced labor claimed most lives, the Nazis also used the gas chambers and execution-by-firing facilities to exterminate hundreds of people deemed unfit for work.

Wantzen stressed that, despite the defendant’s advanced age, it was “important to hold a trial of this type”, in addition to completing the historical record since the survivors are dying.

Seventy-seven years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring Holocaust-linked criminals to justice.

In recent years, several cases have been dropped because the defendant died or was unable to appear in court.

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 several trials.

Since then, the courts have handed down a number of guilty verdicts on these grounds and not for murders or atrocities directly related to the defendant.