A German court on Tuesday sentenced the 97-year-old former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp to two years of house arrest, accusing him of complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people.
A German court on Tuesday sentenced the 97-year-old former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp to two years of house arrest, accusing him of 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 concentration 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.
asylum escape
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.
The accused was young at the time of his alleged crimes and was therefore tried in juvenile court.
“Absolute Hell”
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 witnesses who spoke of the camp’s “absolute hell” for their courage.
“Even though they have to resort to pain again to do it, they think it’s their job,” he said.
time is getting shorter
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 stated that “life-threatening conditions” such as food and water shortages and the spread of deadly diseases, including typhus, were deliberately maintained.
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, many cases have been abandoned because defendants have died or been unable to appear in court.
The conviction of Guard John Demjanjuk for participating in Hitler’s killing machine in 2011 set a legal precedent and paved the way for multiple lawsuits.
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.
In June, a German court sentenced a former guard at a Nazi concentration camp to five years in prison. Josef Schütz, 101, is the oldest person convicted of complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.
source: Noticias
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.