Tue 20 December 2022:
A German court on Tuesday found a 97-year-old former Nazi concentration camp clerk guilty of aiding in the killing of more than 10,000 people.
Irmgard Furchner, who German media called the “secretary of evil,” was given a two-year suspended sentence for aiding the Stutthof concentration camp’s operations during World War II in what may have been the final case of its sort.
Irmgard Furchner worked as a stenographer and typist at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk in Nazi-occupied Poland, from 1943 until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.
\he concentration camp Stutthof in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1945.Stutthof Museum Archive / AP
Presiding judge Dominik Gross handed a two-year suspended sentence to Irmgard Furchner for her role in what prosecutors called the “cruel and malicious murder” of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.
Her defense lawyer had asked for her to be acquitted, arguing that while it was clear that thousands of people were killed in Stutthof, the evidence did not show beyond doubt that Furchner knew about the systematic killing at the concentration camp, according to a press release by the court. In Germany proof of intent is required for criminal liability.
Furchner sat in a wheelchair in the courtroom, wearing a white cap and a medical mask as Gross found her guilty of thousands of counts of accessory to murder.
She was the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for Nazi-era crimes.
Gross noted that justice had come “truly very late” in the case, and only because “the defendant has been lucky to have a particularly long life”.
Furchner had expressed regret as the trial drew to a close this month.
“I’m sorry about everything that happened,” she told the regional court in the northern town of Itzehoe.
Previously, Furchner had attended but remained silent throughout 14 months of court hearings.
Holocaust survivors and their representatives had begged Furchner to speak up during the trial, according to German media reports.
Gross lamented that she had not given a fuller account of her time at Stutthof.
More than 60,000 people died in the camp near Gdansk, in today’s Poland, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website — many by lethal injection and in the camp’s gas chamber, others from disease or starvation.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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