German Court Convicts 97-Year-Old Ex-Secretary at Nazi Camp

A German court on Tuesday convicted a 97-year-old woman of being an accessory to murder for her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.

Irmgard Furchner was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp function. The Itzehoe state court in northern Germany gave her a two-year suspended sentence, German news agency dpa reported.

She was alleged to have “aided and abetted 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.”

In her closing statement, Furchner said she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been at Stutthof at the time.

Furchner was tried in juvenile court because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes.

The defendant tried to skip the start of her trial in September 2021 but was later picked up by police and placed in detention for several days.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called “work education camp” where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

More than 60,000 people were killed there, Hy”d.