A German court rejected an appeal today by a 99-year-old woman who has been convicted of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders at the Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.
Irmgard Furchner, a secretary to the camp’s SS commander, had her appeal against her two-year suspended sentence, issued by the Itzehoe state court in northern Germany in December 2022, rejected by the Federal Court of Justice.
She was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped to run the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk. She was convicted of being an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases.
At a federal court hearing in Leipzig last month, Furchner’s lawyers cast doubt on whether she really had been an accessory to crimes committed by the commander and other senior camp officials and on whether she had truly been aware of what went on at Stutthof.
The court in Itzehoe 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 transfer to the Auschwitz death camp and by being sent on death marches at the end of the war.
A special federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes says that three more cases are pending with prosecutors or courts in various parts of Germany.
Josef Schuster, who heads Germany’s Central Council of Jews, said: “The legal system sent an important message today: even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes.”
The Furchner case is one of several in recent years that built on a precedent established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio car worker John Demjanjuk.
Demjanjuk was convicted of being an accessory to murder over allegations that he had served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. He claimed to be innocent but died before an appeal could be heard.
Prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk’s trial in Munich that if a person had helped a camp function, that was enough to convict them of being an accessory to murders committed there.
A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening on the same reasoning.
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