A 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary has received a two-year suspended sentence after being found guilty of complicity in the murder of 10,500 people.
Irmgard Furchner is the first woman in decades to stand trial over Nazi-era crimes and the latest in a series of nonagenarians brought before German courts in the last decade.
Hours before the start of her trial in September in northern Germany, Furchner went on the run but was tracked down and fitted with an electronic foot tag.
Furchner was tried before a juvenile court in Itzehoe, 60km northwest of Hamburg, as she was 18 or 19 when she began work as a secretary in the Stutthof camp near the German-annexed Free City of Danzig, today Gdansk in Poland.
An estimated 65,000 people died at the Nazi camp, the first set up outside German national borders, including Jews, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war.
Many died of starvation, disease and extreme labour conditions and gas chambers - fixed and mobile - were added from 1944.
From June 1943 until the end of the war in April 1945 Furchner was a secretary to camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe, who served a brief prison spell as an accessory to murder in the 1950s.
While Furchner insisted she had no detailed knowledge of what happened in the camp, prosecutors insisted her contribution “ensured the smooth running of the camp” while her handling SS camp commander’s correspondence and dictation gave her her “knowledge of all occurences and events” at the camp.
Wheeled into the court wearing a white cap and medical mask, Furchner made no comment. It was weeks before she broke her silence, and then briefly, telling the regional court earlier this month: “I’m sorry about everything that happened.”
The court, handing down the maximum possible sentence without jail time, followed the public prosecutor Maxi Wantzen over what he called a “cruel and malicious murder” of camp prisoners.
“This trial is of outstanding historical importance,” he said, “potentially, due to the passage of time, also the last of its kind”.
Furchner’s lawyers demanded aquittal, saying she was one of several camp secretaries and it had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt that she was aware of what went on in the camp.
After two visits as part of the trial, however, judge Dominik Gross said it was clear Furchner “did not remain unaware of what was happening there” and the deplorable conditions from the camp director’s office.
Stutthof survivor Risa Silbert (93), told the court in August that “if she worked as the commander’s secretary, then she knew exactly what happened”.
For 84-year-old Viennese man Josef Salmonovic, whose father was murdered at Stutthoff, Furchner was “indirectly guilty ... even if she just sat in the office and put her stamp on my father’s death certificate”.
Tuesday’s verdict was criticsed by leading German historian Michael Wolfssohn as “pure hypocrisy”.
“Whoever ‘worked’ there deserved to be punished - but decades ago and not just now,” he wrote in the Bild tabloid. “But [post-war] Germany’s justice system didn’t dare go there.”
