A German court rejected an appeal on Tuesday by a 99-year-old former secretary to the SS commander of a Nazi concentration camp who was convicted of complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people during the years of World War II and the Holocaust.
Irmgard Furchner was given a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 for being an accessory to murder eight decades ago when she worked for the commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, about 20 miles east of Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk.
Furchner’s lawyers had cast doubt on whether she had truly been aware of what was going on at the camp during her time as a stenographer in the commander’s office, from 1943 to 1945.
But the Federal Court of Justice found that Furchner, a civilian worker and the first female to be tried for Nazis crimes in decades, “knew and, through her work deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp,” by transportation to the Auschwitz death camp and by being sent on death marches at the end of the war.
A German Jewish leader welcomed the ruling.
“For Holocaust survivors, it is enormously important for a late form of justice to be attempted,” said Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews.
“The legal system sent an important message today: Even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes,” he added.
About 65,000 people died at Stutthof—the first Nazi concentration camp set up outside Germany during World War II and the last to be liberated—including Jewish prisoners, Polish political prisoners and captured Soviet soldiers, some of whom were gassed to death.
Furchner, who married an SS squad leader after the war, made international headlines when she tried to flee as her trial was set to begin in September 2021, leaving the retirement home where she lives and heading to a metro station. She was caught after several hours in the nearby city of Hamburg and held in custody for five days.
During the trial, survivors of the camp (some of whom have since died) testified while a historian told the court that 27 transports carrying 48,000 people arrived at Stutthof between June and October 1944, after the Nazis decided to expand the camp and speed up their mass murder with the use of Zyklon B gas.
After 40 days of silence, she told the court: “I’m sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time—that’s all I can say.”
Presiding judge Dominik Gross said during the trial it was “beyond imagination” that Furchner could not have noticed the smoke and stench of mass killing, stating: “The defendant could have quit at any time.”
