The last person to have ever been convicted in Germany for crimes during the Holocaust has died, a court said on Monday.
Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old former Nazi camp secretary, was handed a two-year suspended sentence in 2022 for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof concentration camp in occupied Poland during World War II, according to AFP.
The camp was established in 1939 by Nazi Germany in a secluded, wooded area near the village of Stutthof, some 22 miles east of the city of Danzig (Gdansk).
Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner followed the orders of the camp’s commander Paul Werner Hoppe. Her husband was an SS officer at the camp, the report added.
About 65,000 people perished at the camp, with most being non-Jewish Poles. The Jewish prisoners deported to the camp came from Warsaw, Bialystok, and forced-labor camps in the occupied Baltic countries.
“Nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from [Furchner],” judge Dominik Gross said in 2022 when delivering the verdict, per AFP.
Moreover, the defendant was aware of the “extremely bad conditions for the prisoners,” Gross noted.
Furchner tried to avert her trial, fleeing the retirement home that she resided in, according to the report. She was caught by police in the nearby city of Hamburg. Her sentence was carried out in a juvenile court because she was a teenager when she committed her crimes.
Furchner was the first woman in decades to be prosecuted for crimes committed under the Nazi regime. In 2024, a German court rejected an appeal by Furchner against her sentence.
The Federal Court of Justice found that Furchner “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.
“For Holocaust survivors, it is enormously important for a late form of justice to be attempted,” Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews, said at the time. “The legal system sent an important message today: Even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes.”
Stutthof was the last concentration camp to be liberated after the Holocaust.
