Former secretary at Nazi concentration camp given a two-year suspended sentence
On Tuesday, 20 December 2022, a 97-year-old woman who worked during the Second World War as a secretary in the Nazi concentration camp of Stutthof was convicted by a court in Itzehoe, Germany and given a two-year suspended prison sentence. According to the verdict, she is an accessory to the murders of more than 10,500 prisoners, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reports.
The trial of Irmgard Furchner is apparently one of the last in which somebody is convicted for crimes which are connected directly to the Holocaust and the Second World War. Furchner was a civilian employee of the command of the Nazi concentration camp, which was located near Gdańsk in occupied Poland, and worked there from June 1943 to April 1945; she was 18 and 19 at the time.
Because Furchner was so young at the time of the crimes, she was tried according to juvenile criminal law. The prosecutor was convinced that she knew very well what was happening in the camp and aided the continuance of the crimes committed there through her work.
From her office on the first floor of the command center, Furchner had a view of most of the camp, including the gathering place where the new prisoners were subjected to selection. Moreover, according to investigators, she could not have avoided both seeing and smelling the all but constant stench of the crematoria burning the bodies of the dead prisoners.
The defense argued that it had not been sufficiently proved that she knew about the atrocities underway at the camp. The prosecution sought a two-year suspended prison sentence, while the defense proposed she be acquitted.
As of 1940, Stutthof originally served as what was called a labor education camp through which tens of thousands of Poles and citizens of the USSR passed, but political prisoners, people suspected of banned same-sex intercourse and Jehova’s Witnesses were also imprisoned there. In mid-1944, thousands of Jews from the Baltics were deported to Stutthof, as were Polish civilians arrested after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
By the end of the Second World War, as many as 65,000 people had died at Stutthof, its feeder camps, or in local death marches. The facility included a gas chamber; many prisoners were also shot dead or given phenol injections to the heart, and thousands of people died of hunger there.
