Nazi commander’s secretary sentenced to 97 for complicity in more than 10,000 deaths

A former secretary working for the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp was convicted of complicity in the murders of more than 10,505 people.

Now 97 years old, Irmgard Furchner was hired as a typist as a teenager at the Stutthof concentration camp, where he worked from 1943 to 1945.

Furchner, one of several women prosecuted for Nazi crimes for decades, was sentenced to two years in prison on parole.

Despite being a civil servant, the judge agreed that he was fully aware of what was going on in the concentration camp.

About 65,000 people are believed to have died in Stutthof in horrific conditions, including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish Poles, and captured Soviet soldiers.

Because Furchner was only 18 or 19 years old at the time, he was tried in a special juvenile court.

At the Stutthof concentration camp, located near the present-day Polish city of Gdansk, various methods were used to kill detainees, and by June 1944 thousands died in the gas chambers.

The court in Itzehoe in northern Germany heard from camp survivors, some of whom died during the trial.

When the trial began in September 2021, Irmgard Furchner escaped from his nursing home and was eventually found by the police on a street in Hamburg.

Paul-Werner Hoppe, commandant of Stutthof concentration camp, was arrested in 1955 as an accomplice to the murder and released five years later.

A string of lawsuits have been filed in Germany since 2011 after the conviction of former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk set the precedent that there was enough evidence to prove complicity in being a guard.

This decision also meant that Officer Furchner could be prosecuted for working directly for the camp commander and handling the correspondence regarding the detainees at Stutthof.

It took him 40 days to break his silence during the trial – until he finally told the court, “I’m sorry for everything that happened.”

“I’m sorry I was in Stutthof at the time, that’s all I can say,” he said.

Defense attorneys argued that Hoppe should be acquitted because of doubts about what he knew, as he was one of the few typewriters in his office.

Historian Stefan Hördler played an important role in the case, accompanying the two judges who toured the concentration camp site. It was clear from the visit that Furchner could see some of the worst situations in the field from the commander’s office.

At the hearing, the historian claimed that 27 transport vehicles with 48,000 people arrived in Stutthof between June and October 1944, after the Nazis decided to expand the camp using Zyklon B gas and precipitate the mass murder.

Hördler described Hoppe’s office as the “nerve center” of everything that happens in Stutthof.

Traveling to testify at the trial, concentration camp survivor Josef Salomonovic was only six years old when his father was shot dead in Stutthof in September 1944.

“Indirectly guilty,” he told reporters in court last December.

“Even if he sat in the office and stamped my father’s death certificate.”

Another survivor, Manfred Goldberg, said the only disappointment was that the two-year suspended sentence “seemed like a mistake”.

“No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to jail, but the punishment should reflect the seriousness of the crimes,” he said.

“If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years in prison, how can someone convicted of complicity in 10,000 murders get the same sentence?”

Nazi crime cases since 2011

– John Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison in 2011 for his role in the murder of more than 28,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp, but was released during the appeal period and died the following year at the age of 91.

– “Accountant of Auschwitz” Oskar Groening was convicted of assisting in the murder of 300,000 Jews in 2015. He was never arrested. He died in 2018 at the age of 96 during the appeal process.

– Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard in Auschwitz, was convicted of aiding in the commission of the mass murder in June 2016, but died a year later at the age of 95, and the appeal process is ongoing.

– Friedrich Karl Berger, a former guard of the Neuengamme concentration camp, was deported from the USA to Germany in February 2021 at the age of 95. German prosecutors dropped the charges against him and his current fate is unknown.

– Josef S was sentenced to five years in prison in June 2022 for helping to murder more than 3,500 prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. At 101, he is the oldest person convicted of Nazi-era war crimes in Germany, but due to his age and poor health, he is unlikely to spend time in prison.

Furchner’s case may be the last case in Germany for Nazi-era crimes, although some cases are still under investigation.

Two more cases have gone to court in recent years regarding Nazi crimes committed in Stutthof.

Last year, a former camp guard was declared ineligible to stand trial, even though the court said there was a “high probability” that he was guilty of complicity.

In 2020, Bruno Dey, another SS guard at the concentration camp, was sentenced to two years in prison with a suspended sentence for complicity in the murder of more than 5,000 prisoners.

– This text was published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-64039347.