Germany convicts 97-year-old woman of complicity in Nazi war crimes

A German court has convicted a 97-year-old woman of being an accessory to murder of over 11,000 people when she was the secretary to a Nazi SS commander at the Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.

The district court in the northern town of Itzehoe handed Irmgard Furchner - known as the 'secretary of evil' - a two-year suspended sentence, according to German broadcaster NDR and other media on Tuesday. 

The woman worked as a typist at a Nazi concentration camp and was regarded as having contributed to the murder of over 11,000 people.

She was sentenced under juvenile law because she was only 18 years old at the time of the crimes.

She worked at the Stutthof concentration camp between 1943 and 1945.

The start of Furchner's trial was delayed in September 2021 when she briefly went on the run. She was caught hours after failing to turn up to court.

Some 65,000 people died of starvation and disease or in the gas chamber at Stutthof near Gdansk, in today's Poland. They included prisoners of war and Jews caught up in the Nazis' extermination campaign. 

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Furchner was alleged to have “aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office.”

The verdict and sentence were in line with the prosecutors’ demands. Defence lawyers had asked for their client to be acquitted, arguing that the evidence hadn’t shown beyond doubt that Furchner knew about the systematic killings at the camp, meaning there was no proof of intent as required for criminal liability.

In her closing statement, Furchner said she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been at Stutthof at the time.

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Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, Stutthof was used as a so-called “work education camp” where forced labourers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and Auschwitz filled the camp, along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

Others incarcerated included political prisoners, accused criminals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved.

Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure or were put to death in a gas chamber.