GERMAN NAZI WAR CRIMES SUSPECT, 96, FACES COURT

Tue 19 October 2021:

On Tuesday, a 96-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary appeared in a German court on charges of war crimes committed during WWII, weeks after fleeing an earlier hearing.

Irmgard Furchner attempted to avoid her trial by fleeing at the end of September, but was apprehended by police and detained for several days.

She appeared in court in the northern town of Itzehoe, near Hamburg, on Tuesday.

Furchner, accused of having contributed as an 18-year-old to the murder of 11,412 people when she was a typist at the Stutthof concentration camp between 1943-45, was taken into the sparse courtroom in a wheelchair.

Behind a white mask and a scarf pulled low over her eyes, her face was barely visible. As the judge and legal team entered the courtroom, security was tight.

Between 1939 and 1945, around 65,000 people died at the Stutthof death camp near Gdansk, Poland, from starvation, disease, or the gas chamber. Prisoners of war and Jews caught up in the Nazis’ extermination campaign were among them.

Furchner allegedly worked in the office of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe, taking dictation of the SS officer’s orders and handling his correspondence, according to prosecutors.

Furchner is being tried as a juvenile because she was under the age of 21 at the time of the incident. She remained silent in response to the allegations made against her on Tuesday. On October 26, the trial is set to resume.

Furchner is the latest nonagenarian to be prosecuted with Holocaust atrocities, in what some see as a rush by prosecutors to bring justice to the victims of some of history’s deadliest mass murders.

Although significant perpetrators — those who issued instructions or pulled the triggers – were convicted in the 1960s “Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials,” lower-level suspects were left uncharged until the 2000s.

(with agency)

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