Irmgard Furchner was a stenographer and typist for the Nazi commander of Stutthof concentration camp during World War II. AFP
A 97-year-old former secretary who worked at a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted for her role in the murders of over 10,500 people.
Furchner, who is the first woman to be tried for the Holocaust tragedy in decades, has been awarded a two-year suspended sentence by a court in Itzehoe, northern Germany.
Who is Irmgard Furchner and what is she accused of? What had happened at Stutthof concentration camp? We explain.
Who is Irmgard Furchner?
Irmgard Furchner was employed as a stenographer and typist for the Nazi commander of Stutthof concentration camp, which was located near modern-day Gdansk in Poland.
She worked there from 1943 to 1945.
Irmgard Furchner has been found guilty of being an accessory to over 10,000 murders. AP
After World War II, she married a Schutzstaffel (SS) squad leader named Heinz Furchstam.
Furchner went on to serve as an administrative worker in a small town in northern Germany, as per BBC.
Her husband died in 1972.
Furchner, dubbed “the secretary of evil” by German media, has previously claimed she was not aware of the details of the atrocities that took place in the Stutthof camp, as per The Washington Post.
In September last year when the trial began, Furchner went on the run from her retirement home but was found several hours later on a street in Hamburg by the police, notes BBC.
Irmgard Furchner charges
As many as 65,000 people, including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish Poles and captured Soviet soldiers, are believed to have been killed in Stutthof, as per a BBC report.
Furchner, who was then around 17 and 18 years old, has been accused of aiding and abetting “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”.
She was tried in a special juvenile court owing to her age at the time of the crimes.
The court also said it is convinced 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”, as per Associated Press (AP) report.
Acknowledging her role in the crimes, presiding judge Dominik Gross said it was “beyond imagination” that Furchner would not have observed the smoke and stench of mass killing, reported BBC.
“The defendant could have quit at any time,” Gross added.
In her closing statement, Furchner said she was “sorry” for all that had happened.
“I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time – that’s all I can say,” she was quoted as saying by BBC.
Her defence lawyers had called for her acquittal, arguing that there were doubts about what she knew as she was one of the many typists in Stutthof commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe’s office.
It is not yet clear if Furchner plans to challenge the sentence, reported AP.
As per BBC, Nazi camp survivor Josef Salomonovic — who was only six when his father was killed at Stutthof in 1944 — had told reporters last December that Furchner was “indirectly guilty”, adding “even if she just sat in the office and put her stamp on my father’s death certificate”.
Calling the trial of “outstanding historical importance”, public prosecutor Maxi Wantzen said that it was “potentially, due to the passage of time, the last of its kind”, reported Al Jazeera.
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Who was held in Stutthof camp?
Several ways were used to murder detainees at Stutthof with thousands dying in gas chambers.
Many different ways were used to kill detainees in Nazi concentration camp Stutthof. AP File Photo
Historian Stefan H?rdler told the German court that 48,000 people were brought to Stutthof between June and October 1944, following the Nazis’ decision of expanding the camp and ramping up “mass murder with the use of Zyklon B gas”, reported BBC.
He called Hoppe’s office the “nerve centre” for whatever happened at Stutthof camp.
H?rdler also gave evidence which was provided by Furchner’s husband in 1954 where he had said: “At the Stutthof camp people were gassed. The staff at the commandant’s HQ talked about it.”
Stutthof was initially a place where Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig were kept. Later, it was used as a so-called “work education camp” where forced labourers, mostly Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to carry out sentences.
As per AP report, from mid-1944, a large number of Jews from “ghettos in the Baltics and from the Auschwitz network of concentration camps”, as well as thousands of Polish civilians captured in the Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising were detained in Stutthof.
Others imprisoned in the camp consisted of “political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexuality and Jehovah’s Witnesses”, AP reported.
With inputs from agencies
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