A 99-year-old German woman who worked as a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp during World War II remains convicted of being an accessory to murder after a court rejected her appeal on August 20.
But Irmgard Furchner won’t have to spend any time in prison, as the court gave her a suspended sentence. She was originally convicted by the state court in Itzehoe in 2022, and given a suspended sentence, for being an accessory to around 10,000 murders during the second world war.
Furchner was charged with participating in the Nazi system that helped the Reich carry out its murders at the camp, which was located near what was then Danzig, and is now the Polish city Gdansk. Her conviction for helping with more than 10,000 murders was supplemented by a conviction of being an accessory to attempted murder in five additional cases.
During a hearing last month, the elderly woman’s lawyers said it was not clear that their client was actually an accessory to any crimes that were carried out by the officers and camp officials. They also questioned whether she even knew that systematic executions were taking place at Stutthof.
But the state court in Itzehoe was certain, stating that she worked as a stenographer for the commandant from 1943 to 1945. The court said she had to know that prisoners were being gassed to death and dying from the neglect and harsh conditions in the concentration camp. The court also believed Furchner must have known that some of the prisoners were sent to the infamous death camp at Auschwitz.
During the original court case, prosecutors said this may be the last case of this type, though another prosecutorial office in Ludwigsburg said they’re eying three potential additional cases. But the defendants are so old there is a question of whether any of them would be deemed fit to stand trial.
Josef Schuster, head of the German Central Council of Jews, applauded the ruling, saying that survivors of the Holocaust have a legitimate interest in seeing justice carried out.
A 2011 conviction of Ohio auto worker John Demjanjuk opened the door for the accessory to murder cases that have been launched against lower level employees in the Third Reich. Demjanjuk protested his innocence, saying that he had never been a guard at the death camp in Sobibor, but he died before his appeal was heard.
Before that case, German courts required the state to give specific evidence that defendants had participated in specific murders, which was next to impossible.
