A 99-year-old former Nazi camp secretary on Tuesday, August 20 lost her appeal against her conviction for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people, in what could be the last judgment of its kind in Germany.
Irmgard Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 for her role in what prosecutors called the "cruel and malicious murder" of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland. Her defense had filed an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice against the judgment, handed down by a regional court in the northern town of Itzehoe.
But the higher court, whose job was to examine whether certain points of law had been applied correctly, on Tuesday upheld the judgment. "The conviction of the defendant... to a two-year suspended sentence is final," presiding judge Gabriele Cirener said.
Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner took the dictation and handled the correspondence of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe while her husband was a fellow SS officer at the camp. An estimated 65,000 people died at the camp near today's Gdansk, including Jewish prisoners. Delivering the verdict in 2022, presiding judge Dominik Gross 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."
Furchner tried to abscond from her trial as the proceedings were set to begin in September 2021, fleeing the retirement home where she was living. She managed to evade police for several hours before being apprehended in the nearby city of Hamburg. But she expressed regret as the trial drew to a close, telling the court she was "sorry about everything that happened."
Furchner was a teenager when she committed her crimes and was therefore tried in a juvenile court. Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring to justice criminals linked to the Holocaust.
In recent years, several cases have been abandoned as the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial. The 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, on the basis that he served as part of Hitler's killing machine, set a legal precedent and paved the way for several trials. Since then, courts have handed down several guilty verdicts on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual accused.