A 97-year-old woman was sentenced for being involved in the murder of thousands of people during World War Two, on Tuesday. She had served as a Nazi concentration camp secretary during the war time. The trial would be Germany’s last trials in connection with crimes done during the Second World War.
In the German town of Itzehoe, a district court gave Irmgard Furchner a two-year suspended sentence for assisting the murder of 10,505 people and the sought murder of five people, a court spokesperson said.
A statement given in the court said the prisoners were “cruelly killed by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp, by transports to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and by being sent on so-called death marches”.
Around 65,000 persons died of hunger and disease or in the gas chamber at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk in today’s Poland. These people were prisoners of war and Jews captured to be exterminated in the Nazis’ campaign.
The defendant’s role there was to complete paperwork that “was necessary for the organisation of the camp and the execution of the cruel, systematic acts of killing”, the court’s statement added.
“It is very important for the survivors and for us today that this trial was brought to an end .. and that there was a verdict which established guilt,” said state prosecutor Maxi Wantzen.
The accusation had originally charged Furchner with assisting in the killings of 11,412 people, but due to lack of sufficient evidence it was difficult to prove to the court of her guilt for each case.
Furchner was wheeled into court wearing a cream-coloured winter coat and beret, and with a blanket over her lap. Her defence lawyer would not comment when asked by reporters how she took the ruling.
In a concluding statement at the trial at the start of this month, Furchner accepted her crime and felt sorry for what she did and expressed penitence that she had been in Stutthof at the time.
“Only a secretary, you might say, but the role that even a secretary had back then in the bureaucracy of a (concentration camp) is a significant one,” Wantzen said.
Furchner worked at Stutthof, from 1943 to 1945 and was convicted under juvenile law due to her age being between 18 and 19 then.
The initial period of Furchner’s trial was held up in September 2021 when she briefly ran away. She was captured hours later after escaping the court.
In what is perceived as a rush by prosecutors to seize the last chance to bring justice for the victims of some of the worst mass atrocities in history, she is the most recent nonagenarian to be charged with Holocaust crimes.
