German court upholds conviction of 99-year-old former Nazi camp secretary
Al Jazeera
Irmgard Furchner loses her appeal against a conviction of complicity in more than 10,000 murders during World War II.
A German court has rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old woman who was convicted of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders in her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.
The ruling on Tuesday by the Federal Court of Justice in Leipzig is final. It came four months before Irmgard Furchner’s two-year suspended sentence handed down by the Itzehoe Regional Court ends in December.
She was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, function.
Last month, Furchner’s lawyers cast doubt on whether she really was an accessory to crimes committed by the commander and other senior camp officials, and on whether she had truly been aware of what was going on at Stutthof.
In 2022, the Itzehoe court said that judges were convinced that Furchner “knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp from June 1, 1943, to April 1, 1945, 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.
