Holocaust: 99-year-old former Nazi secretary loses appeal against mass murder conviction

A 99-year-old former Nazi camp secretary on Tuesday lost an appeal against her conviction for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people, in what could be the last judgement of its kind in Germany.

Irmgard Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 for her role in what prosecutors called the “cruel and malicious murder” of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

Her defence appealed to the Federal Court of Justice, but it upheld the ruling. “The conviction of the defendant … to a two-year suspended sentence is final,” presiding judge Gabriele Cirener said.

An estimated 65,000 people died at the camp near today’s Gdansk, including “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war”, according to prosecutors.

Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner took the dictation and handled the correspondence of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe while her husband was a fellow SS officer at the camp.

Delivering the verdict in 2022, presiding judge Dominik Gross said that “nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her” and that the defendant was aware of the “extremely bad conditions for the prisoners”.

Furchner tried to abscond from her trial as the proceedings were set to begin in September 2021, fleeing the retirement home where she was living.

She managed to evade police for several hours before being apprehended in the nearby city of Hamburg.

Although the camp’s abysmal conditions and hard labour claimed the most lives, the Nazis also operated gas chambers and execution-by-shooting facilities to exterminate hundreds of people deemed unfit for labour.

Cirener said Furchner had “seen the catastrophic physical condition of the prisoners … and had also noticed the daily odour of burning human flesh emanating from the crematorium chimney”.

She also “directly supported the camp commander and others working in the camp administration … through the general performance of her duties”, Cirener said.

Furchner expressed regret as the trial drew to a close, telling the court she was “sorry about everything that happened”.

Furchner was a teenager when she committed her crimes and was therefore tried in a juvenile court — a decision that the Federal Supreme Court also found to be correct.

In their sentencing, the judges in Itzehoe had taken into account “the passage of time, the defendant’s hierarchically subordinate function and possible impaired judgement due to indoctrination”, Cirener said.

Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, welcomed the ruling and said Furchner had clearly been a “conscious accomplice” to murder.

“It’s not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life. It’s about a perpetrator having to answer for her actions,” he said.

Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring to justice criminals linked to the Holocaust.

The 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, on the basis that he served as part of Hitler’s killing machine, set a legal precedent and paved the way for several trials.

Since then, courts have handed down several guilty verdicts on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual accused.

However, in recent years, several cases have been abandoned as the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial.

In June, a court in the city of Hanau refused to open proceedings against a 99-year-old alleged former guard at the Sachsenhausen Nazi camp as the suspect was deemed unfit to stand trial.