Judges consider Irmgard Furchner, 97, accomplice to the murder of more than 10,000 people
The Itzehoe District Court on Tuesday sentenced Irmgard Furchner, a 97-year-old German woman, to two years’ imprisonment on probation, who was found guilty of complicity in more than 10,500 murders as secretary of the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp. The court in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein found it proven that the woman worked as a shorthand typist for the concentration camp commander between 1943 and 1945 when she was 18 and 19 years old and that through her work she always knew about the crimes committed by the Nazis at that place.
The court’s verdict is in line with the request of the prosecutors, who demanded 24 months in prison on the basis of the Juvenile Penal Code, while the old woman’s defense demanded her immediate release, without costs and sorrows. The vast majority of the 15 private prosecutors supported the prosecutors’ sentencing proposal, although one of them demanded that the elderly woman be imprisoned. From the start of the proceedings on September 30, 2021, the judges heard the testimony of eight of the 31 private plaintiffs, mostly via videoconference from the United States, Israel or Poland.
Survivors of Nazi concentration camps told of the horrors and mass deaths of prisoners at Stutthof. The most relevant witness at the trial was the expert historian Stefan Hördler, who, during 14 hearings, explained to the court in detail the operation of the concentration camp. The defense tried to challenge him for partiality, but the judges rejected that initiative. The secretary remained silent almost until the end of the trial, although she was repeatedly questioned by the private prosecutor. We had to wait until the 40th session to hear his only apology: “I’m sorry for everything that happened. I’m sorry I was in Stutthof at the time. I can’t say more,” he said.
As secretary to the then concentration camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, she had all the documents prepared for her boss and signed by him about the excesses of Stutthof, where thousands of prisoners were brutally murdered, died of hunger or disease and ended up in crematoria. As a civilian employee, Irmgard Furchner was part of the gigantic killing machine of the National Socialists, according to the verdict pronounced on Tuesday. Without the bureaucratic apparatus, these crimes would not have been possible. The trial against the Secretary may be one of the last against Nazi criminals due to the advanced age of those involved. During this process, several private plaintiffs died and others were already so weak in their heads that they could not testify.
In the Stutthof concentration camp, near the current Polish city of Gdansk, more than 100,000 people were interned under inhumane conditions during World War II. According to historians’ records, about 65,000 people died, many of them Jews. The concentration camp was feared for its poor attention to the needs of the prisoners, who mostly died of exhaustion, starvation, epidemics and ill-treatment. In Stutthof there was a crematorium to dispose of corpses and a facility to kill prisoners with a shot in the neck.
The now-convicted secretary tried to escape prosecution before the trial began. On the day he was due to appear in court, he escaped early in the morning from his retirement home in Quickborn with an overnight bag. She got up at the patrol who came to pick her up to bring her to justice. Hours later, she was stopped in a central street in Hamburg by officers who recognized her. The court then issued a search and arrest warrant and ordered his detention. His failed escape attempt cost him five days in custody.
Source: La Verdad
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