Defendant Irmgard Furchner is brought to a courtroom for her trial, in Itzehoe, Germany, in December. The 97-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II has been found guilty of more than 10,500 cases of complicity to murder and given a two-year suspended sentence. Photo by Christian Charisius/EPA-EFE
Dec. 20 (UPI) — A Berlin court convicted a 97-year-old woman on Tuesday for aiding and abetting more than 10,500 deaths at a Nazi concentration camp in the 1940s and was given a two-year suspended sentence.
Irmgard Furchner served as a civilian typist in the commandant’s office at the Stutthof concentration camp near Nazi-occupied Gdansk, Poland, from 1943 to 1945, where many Jews were systematically killed.
More than 100,000 were housed at the Stutthof camp during World War II with 65,000 of them eventually dying there. The camp was well known for its deliberate lack of care and mistreatment of prisoners along with its gas chambers and neck-shooting facilities.
Furchner’s direct boss, camp commander Paul-Werner Hoppe, was imprisoned in 1955 for being an accessory to murder, though he was released five years later.
“I am sorry for everything that happened, and I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time,” Furchner told the court. “That’s all I can say.”
Furchner’s defense attorneys argued that there was no evidence showing that she knew about the systematic killing at the concentration camp and prosecutors failed to show criminal liability.
Prosecutors and some survivors noted that she directly aided in activities that led to the deaths and should be punished.
“No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes,” said Stutthof survivor Manfred Goldberg 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?”
