A court in Germany has rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old woman who was convicted for being an accessory to the murder of over 10,000 people while she served at a Nazi concentration camp during WWII.
Former camp secretary Irmgard Furchner was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2022 for her role in what prosecutors called the “cruel and malicious murder” of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.
Last month, Furchner’s lawyers appealed against the sentence, saying there was doubt over whether she was aware of what was happening in the camp and whether she had been an accessory to SS crimes.
But a higher court upheld the judgement on Tuesday, with judge Gabriele Cirener saying: “The conviction of the defendant... to a two-year suspended sentence is final.”
She added that Furchner “knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp from 1 June 1943 to 1 April 1945, deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp”.
Following her arrival at the camp in 1943, Furchner, whose husband was an SS officer at Stutthof, handled the correspondence of camp commander Paul-Werner Hoppe. During her trial in 2022, presiding judge Dominik Gross had said that “nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her” and that the defendant was aware of the “extremely bad conditions for the prisoners.”
At Hoppe’s trial in 1954, Furchner testified that the camp commander had dictated letters to her but claimed she knew nothing about the mass exterminations conducted at Stutthof.
Mass killings
Notorious for its appalling conditions, Stutthof had gas chambers though many prisoners were also killed by shooting or lethal injection, while others died of starvation or disease. Many more were killed by ‘death marches’ from the camp held towards the end of the war.
Established in September 1939 following Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of WWII, the camp housed an estimated 100,000 prisoners, many of them Jews but also non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. By the time the site was liberated in 1945, an estimated 65,000 people had died there.
Furchner was born in 1925 in the Free City of Danzig, today the Polish port city of Gdańsk, near to where the Stutthof camp was located. Though 96 years of age in 2021 when she was charged with accessory to 11,412 murders and 18 attempted murders, Furchner was tried in a juvenile court as she was only 18 at the time of her alleged offenses.
She initially refused to appear in court on the grounds that her trial would be “degrading”. She fled from her nursing home ahead of the trial, and the judge in the case issued a warrant for her arrest, with police detaining her just hours later.
She was subsequently finally found guilty of complicity in the mass killing, after which she broke a 40-year silence, telling the court, “I'm sorry about everything that happened”, the BBC reported after the trial. “I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time – that's all I can say,” she said.
Time running out
Furchner’s trial is sure to be one of the last of WWII’s Nazis and their collaborators due to their advanced age. In 2021, a 96-year-old former Stutthof guard, identified by German authorities only as “Harry S”, was determined to be unfit to stand trial for complicity in deaths at the camp.
Another former guard at Stutthof, Bruno Dey, 93, was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2020.
Furchner’s trial and others in recent years have built on a precedent set in 2011 by the conviction on over 28,000 counts of accessory to murder of former U.S. citizen John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born Nazi collaborator who served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. Demjanjuk always protested his innocence but died at the age of 91 before his appeal could be heard.
Last month, Furchner’s lawyers appealed against the sentence, saying there was doubt over whether she was aware of what was happening in the camp and whether she had been an accessory to SS crimes.
But a higher court upheld the judgement on Tuesday, with judge Gabriele Cirener saying: “The conviction of the defendant... to a two-year suspended sentence is final.”
She added that Furchner “knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp from 1 June 1943 to 1 April 1945, deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp”.
Following her arrival at the camp in 1943, Furchner, whose husband was an SS officer at Stutthof, handled the correspondence of camp commander Paul-Werner Hoppe. During her trial in 2022, presiding judge Dominik Gross had said that “nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her” and that the defendant was aware of the “extremely bad conditions for the prisoners.”
At Hoppe’s trial in 1954, Furchner testified that the camp commander had dictated letters to her but claimed she knew nothing about the mass exterminations conducted at Stutthof.
Mass killings
Notorious for its appalling conditions, Stutthof had gas chambers though many prisoners were also killed by shooting or lethal injection, while others died of starvation or disease. Many more were killed by ‘death marches’ from the camp held towards the end of the war.
Established in September 1939 following Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of WWII, the camp housed an estimated 100,000 prisoners, many of them Jews but also non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. By the time the site was liberated in 1945, an estimated 65,000 people had died there.
Furchner was born in 1925 in the Free City of Danzig, today the Polish port city of Gdańsk, near to where the Stutthof camp was located. Though 96 years of age in 2021 when she was charged with accessory to 11,412 murders and 18 attempted murders, Furchner was tried in a juvenile court as she was only 18 at the time of her alleged offenses.
She initially refused to appear in court on the grounds that her trial would be “degrading”. She fled from her nursing home ahead of the trial, and the judge in the case issued a warrant for her arrest, with police detaining her just hours later.
She was subsequently finally found guilty of complicity in the mass killing, after which she broke a 40-year silence, telling the court, “I'm sorry about everything that happened”, the BBC reported after the trial. “I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time – that's all I can say,” she said.
Time running out
Furchner’s trial is sure to be one of the last of WWII’s Nazis and their collaborators due to their advanced age. In 2021, a 96-year-old former Stutthof guard, identified by German authorities only as “Harry S”, was determined to be unfit to stand trial for complicity in deaths at the camp.
Another former guard at Stutthof, Bruno Dey, 93, was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2020.
Furchner’s trial and others in recent years have built on a precedent set in 2011 by the conviction on over 28,000 counts of accessory to murder of former U.S. citizen John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born Nazi collaborator who served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. Demjanjuk always protested his innocence but died at the age of 91 before his appeal could be heard.
Source: LeMonde/ DW/ Guardian/ BBC
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