Nazi concentration camp secretary’s conviction upheld by court

One of Germany’s highest courts has upheld a two-year suspended sentence given to a 99-year-old woman who had worked as a secretary to the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp in what is likely to be one of the last verdicts of its kind.
Irmgard Furchner had been convicted of aiding and abetting more than 10,500 murders that had been carried out during her stint at the Stutthof camp, near Gdansk in German-occupied Poland, from June 1943 to April 1945. She was given a relatively mild youth sentence because she had been younger than 21 at the time of the murders.
During the trial, which concluded a few days before Christmas 2022, Furchner said she regretted the atrocities that had been committed at Stutthof and that she had been part of its administration, but did not accept that she was criminally responsible for the deaths.
• Nazi concentration camp secretary, 97, guilty of aiding over 10,000 murders
Her lawyer lodged an appeal against the conviction, arguing that as a typist and secretary she had not been sufficiently involved in the machinery of death to warrant a prison sentence.
On Tuesday morning the appeal was rejected a federal court in Leipzig, meaning that the sentence is now legally binding.
Furchner’s case attracted international attention not only because of her advanced age but also because she briefly appeared to abscond on the first day of the trial in 2021 after telling judges in a letter that she wished to “spare myself these embarrassments and not to expose myself to the mockery of humankind”.
It was also a test of the legal boundaries around prosecutions of this type: what counts as “psychological complicity” in the Nazi regime’s mass murders, and what counts as an extermination camp.
Udo Weiss, for the prosecution, described the case as “possibly the last chance” to clarify these questions in court.
Since a landmark ruling in 2011, when the Ukrainian-born former SS guard John Demjanjuk was convicted of abetting the murder of 28,060 Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Poland, German judges have followed the principle that those who worked in the camps and were aware of the systematic nature of the killings were accessories to them, even if it cannot be proven that they directly took part.
Yet Furchner’s prosecution was unusual in two respects. First, she had worked for the Stutthof commandant Paul Werner Hoppe as a typist and personal assistant rather than as a guard, an overseer or a doctor.
Her lawyer, Wolf Molkentin, argued that her duties in the camp had primarily been “neutral” secretarial and administrative work and that she had not known the full extent of the crimes that were being committed around her.
Molkentin also disputed whether Stutthof could strictly be classified as a “pure” extermination camp in the same way as Sobibor or Auschwitz.
It was founded on September 2, 1939, the second day of the Second World War, becoming the first German concentration camp outside Germany’s borders.
Over the course of nearly six years, between 63,000 and 65,000 of its 110,000 inmates are estimated to have died, including about 28,000 Jews. Many were executed but others died of starvation, disease, exhaustion and cold.
However, the court ruled that in her “trustworthy” work with the commandant, Furchner had provided not only “physical” but also “psychological” support to the murders in the camp.
“As the only stenotypist, her activities were of central importance for the thoroughly bureaucratically organised operations of the camp,” it said in a statement.
Furchner and her lawyer have yet to issue a response to the verdict.