From the BBC:
“Irmgard Furchner: Nazi typist
guilty of complicity in 10,500 murders”
A former secretary who worked for
the commander of a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted of complicity in
the murders of more than 10,505 people. Irmgard Furchner, 97, was taken on as a
teenaged typist at Stutthof and worked there from 1943 to 1945. Furchner, the
first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades, was given a two-year suspended
jail term. Although she was a civilian worker, the judge agreed she was fully
aware of what was going on at the camp.
Some 65,000 people are thought to
have died in horrendous conditions at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners,
non-Jewish Poles and captured Soviet soldiers. As Furchner was only 18 or 19 at
the time, she was tried in a special juvenile court. At Stutthof, located near
the modern-day Polish city of Gdansk, a variety of methods was used to murder
detainees and thousands died in gas chambers there from June 1944. The court at
Itzehoe in northern Germany heard from survivors of the camp, some of whom have
died during the trial. When the trial began in September 2021, Irmgard Furchner
went on the run from her retirement home and was eventually found by police on
a street in Hamburg. Stutthof commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe was jailed in 1955
for being an accessory to murder and he was released five years later.
A series of prosecutions have
taken place in Germany since 2011, after the conviction of former Nazi death
camp guard John Demjanjuk set the precedent that being a guard was sufficient
evidence to prove complicity. That ruling also meant that civilian worker
Furchner could stand trial, as she worked directly to the camp commander,
dealing with correspondence surrounding Stutthof detainees. It took 40 days for
her to break her silence in the trial, when she told the court "I'm sorry
about everything that happened". "I regret that I was in Stutthof at
the time - that's all I can say," she said. Her defence lawyers argued she
should be acquitted because of doubts surrounding what she knew, as she was one
of several typists in Hoppe's office.
Historian Stefan Hördler played a
key role in the trial, accompanying two judges on a visit to the site of the
camp. It became clear from the visit that Furchner was able to see some of the
worst conditions at the camp from the commandant's office. The historian told
the trial that 27 transports carrying 48,000 people arrived at Stutthof between
June and October 1944, after the Nazis decided to expand the camp and speed up
mass murder with the use of Zyklon B gas. Mr Hördler described Hoppe's office
as the "nerve centre" for everything that went on at Stutthof.
(Josef Salomonovic was persuaded
by his wife to travel from Vienna to northern Germany to give evidence last
December)
Camp survivor Josef Salomonovic,
who travelled to the court to give evidence at the trial, was only six when his
father was shot dead at Stutthof in September 1944. "She's indirectly
guilty," he told reporters at the court last December, "even if she just
sat in the office and put her stamp on my father's death certificate." Another
survivor, Manfred Goldberg, said his only disappointment was that the two-year
suspended sentence "appears to be a mistake". "No-one in their
right mind would send a 97 year old to prison, but the sentence should reflect
the severity of the crimes," he said. "If a shoplifter is sentenced
to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000
murders is given the same sentence?"
Nazi crime cases since 2011
John Demjanjuk - jailed in
2011 for five years for his part in the murder of more than 28,000 Jews at the
Sobibor death camp but released pending an appeal and died the following year
aged 91
Oskar Gröning - the
"Bookkeeper of Auschwitz", sentenced in 2015 as an accessory to the
murder of 300,000 Jews. He never went to jail, dying in 2018 aged 96 during the
appeals process
Reinhold Hanning - former
SS guard at Auschwitz convicted of helping to commit mass murder in June 2016
but died a year later aged 95 with appeals still pending
Friedrich Karl Berger -
former guard at the Neuengamme concentration camp, deported to Germany from the
US in February 2021 aged 95. German prosecutors dropped charges against him and
his current fate is unknown
Josef S - jailed for five
years in June 2022 for assisting in the murder of more than 3,500 prisoners in
Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Aged 101, he is the oldest person to be
convicted for Nazi-era war crimes in Germany, but because of age and ill health
is unlikely to spend any time in prison
Furchner's trial could be the
last to take place in Germany into Nazi-era crimes, although a few cases are
still being investigated. Two other cases have gone to court in recent years
for Nazi crimes committed at Stutthof. Last year a former camp guard was
declared unfit for trial even though the court said there was a "high
degree of probability" he was guilty of complicity. In 2020, another SS
camp guard, Bruno Dey, was given a two-year suspended jail term for complicity
in the murder of more than 5,000 prisoners.
^ The World didn't accept (and
still doesn't accept) when Germans claimed they "Didn't Know" about
the German War Crimes being committed during World War 2.
The World won't accept when
Russians claim they "Didn't Know" about the Russian War Crimes
currently being committed in Ukraine. ^
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