AFP – General Justice condemns elderly woman complicit in killing 10,000 people in a Nazi camp 12/2022 06:46

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

In one of the last Holocaust cases in the country, Irmgard Furchner was tried for alleged involvement in the “brutal and diabolical murder” of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

The conviction came after the Office of the Chief Public Prosecutor requested a mostly “symbolic” decision emphasizing the “extraordinary historical significance” of the process.

The accused, whose face was blurred in the photographs reflected in the press with the court decision, was present in a wheelchair during the reading of the verdict.

He hardly spoke throughout the process, only at the last hearings, when he broke the silence already in December.

“I’m sorry for everything that happened,” he said in district court in the (northern) city of Itzehoe.

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

Furchner tried to escape earlier in the process in September 2021. He escaped from the nursing home where he lived and went to a subway station.

The former secretary tried to evade the police for hours before being caught in nearby Hamburg. He was imprisoned for five days.

The lawyers demanded the acquittal of the old woman, arguing that the evidence presented at the hearing “doesn’t prove beyond any doubt” that the woman had knowledge of the murders.

– “Absolute Hell” –

The accused was young at the time of his alleged crimes and was therefore tried in juvenile court.

Prosecutors estimate that 65,000 people died at the camp near present-day Gdansk, including “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Russian-Soviet prisoners of war”.

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

According to the indictment, Furchner wrote and drafted the SS officer’s orders and delivered his mail.

During the trial hearings, survivors of the Stutthof camp gave an eloquent account of their suffering.

Prosecutor Maxi Wantzen thanked the bravery of the witnesses, including some who were involved, and said they spoke of the “absolute hell” of the camp.

“They think it’s their job, even though they have to resort to pain over and over to do it,” he said.

– Shorter and shorter duration –

The prosecutor pointed out to the judges that the defendant’s administrative work “enabled the smooth running of the camp” and kept him “aware of all the events in Stutthof”.

He also said that “life-threatening conditions” such as food and water shortages and the spread of deadly diseases, including typhus, were deliberately sustained and emerged immediately.

While poor camp conditions and forced labor caused the most deaths, the Nazis also destroyed hundreds of people deemed unfit for work using gas chambers and firing squad facilities.

Wantzen noted that despite the defendant’s advanced age, “it is important to continue the trial and complete the historical record” as Holocaust survivors die.

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

In recent years, some cases have been interrupted due to the death of defendants or the inability to appear in court.

The 2011 conviction of guard John Demjanjuk for being part of the Hitler regime’s killing machine set a legal precedent and paved the way for numerous trials.

Since then, courts have handed down a large number of guilty verdicts not for murders or atrocities directly related to the accused, but for this reason.

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© Agence France-Presse