German court upholds conviction of ex-Nazi concentration camp secretary aged 99

A German court has rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old woman who was convicted of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders in her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during the Second World War.

The Federal Court of Justice upheld the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, who was given a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 by a state court in Itzehoe in northern Germany.

She was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, function. 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 was an accessory to crimes committed by the commander and other senior camp officials, and on whether she had truly been aware of what was going on at Stutthof.

The Itzehoe court said 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 transportation to the Auschwitz death camp and by being sent on death marches at the end of the war.

Prosecutors said during the original proceedings that Furchner’s trial may be the last of its kind. However, a special federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes said three more cases are pending with prosecutors or courts in various parts of Germany. With any suspects now at a very advanced age, questions increasingly arise over their fitness to stand trial.

Germany’s main Jewish leader welcomed the ruling.

“For Holocaust survivors, it is enormously important for a late form of justice to be attempted,” Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews, said in a statement.

“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 as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. Demjanjuk, who denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.

German courts previously required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guard’s participation in a specific killing, often a near-impossible task.

However, prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk’s trial in Munich that helping a camp function was enough to convict someone as an accessory to murders committed there.

A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening on the same reasoning.

Furchner was tried in a juvenile court because she was 18 and 19 at the time of the alleged crimes, and the court could not establish beyond a doubt her “maturity of mind” then.

In the ruling, presiding Judge Gabriele Cirener wrote that the fact that Stutthof was not always a death camp that existed for the sole purpose of extermination, such as Auschwitz or Sobibor, was not legally relevant.

She said the “catastrophic detention conditions” and forced labour still led to the “cruel killing” of inmates, even if they were not killed immediately.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, Stutthof was later used as a “work education camp” where forced labourers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp, along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.

Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. More than 60,000 people were killed at the camp.