A former secretary for the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted of participation in the killings of over 10,500 individuals.
Irmgard Furchner, now aged 97, was hired as a young typewriter at Stutthof from 1943 to 1945.
The first woman to be tried for Nazi atrocities in decades, Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence.
The judge concluded that, despite being a civilian employee, she was fully aware of what was occurring at the camp.
Approximately 65,000 people are believed to have perished at Stutthof, including Jewish inmates, non-Jewish Poles, and Soviet POWs.
Furchner was found guilty of involvement in the murders of 10,505 individuals and attempted murders of five others. Due to her age of 18 or 19, she was tried in a special juvenile court.
At Stutthof, located near the modern-day Polish city of Gdansk, detainees were murdered using a variety of ways beginning in June 1944, and hundreds perished in gas chambers.
A court in Itzehoe, located in northern Germany, heard testimony from survivors of the concentration camp, some of whom perished during the trial.
Irmgard Furchner fled her retirement home when the trial began in September 2021 and was eventually apprehended on a street in Hamburg.
Paul-Werner Hoppe was imprisoned for complicity in a murder in 1955 and was released from prison five years later.
In Germany, a series of prosecutions have occurred since 2011, when the conviction of former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk established the precedent that guard status was sufficient evidence to prove involvement.
This decision also meant that civilian employee Furchner may stand prosecution, as she worked directly for the camp commander and dealt with Stutthof inmate correspondence.
It took her forty days to break her silence throughout the trial, when she said, “I’m sorry for everything that occurred.”
She added, “I regret being in Stutthof at the time; that is all I can say.”
As one of several typists in Hoppe’s office, her defense attorneys contended she should be acquitted because her knowledge was questionable.
Stefan Hordler played a crucial part in the trial by accompanying two judges on a site visit to the concentration camp.
Furchner was able to observe some of the worst circumstances at the camp from the commandant’s office, as evidenced by his visit.
The historian testified at trial that between June and October 1944, 27 shipments carrying 48,000 prisoners arrived at Stutthof, after the Nazis decided to enlarge the camp and accelerate mass murder with Zyklon B gas.
Mr. Hordler described Hoppe’s office as the “nerve center” of all Stutthof operations.
The presiding judge, Dominik Gross, stated that it was “beyond imagining” that Furchner could not notice the smoke and stink of mass murder: “The defendant could have quit at any point.”
Josef Salomonovic, a camp survivor who traveled to the court to testify at the trial, was just six years old when his father was executed at Stutthof in September 1944.
Even if she simply sat in the office and stamped my father’s death certificate, he told reporters in court last December, “she is partly responsible for his death.”
Another Stutthof survivor, Manfred Goldberg, stated that the nature of the sentence was his main regret.
“It’s a foregone conclusion that a 97-year-old would not be put to prison,” he told, “so it could only be a symbolic sentence.”
“However, the length of the sentence should reflect the unparalleled barbarism of being found involved in the death of over 10,000 individuals.”
Furchner’s trial could be the last in Germany for crimes committed during the Nazi era, but a few cases are still under investigation.
In the past few years, two further trials have been held for crimes perpetrated by the Nazis at Stutthof.
A former camp guard was deemed incompetent to stand trial in 2016 despite the court’s finding that there was a “high degree of possibility” he was guilty of collaboration.
Bruno Dey, a second SS camp guard, was given a two-year suspended sentence for his role in the death of almost 5,000 detainees in 2020.
