German Court Convicts 97-Year-Old Man in One of Latest Holocaust Trials



On Tuesday, the court found guilty 97-year-old former Nazi camp secretary of complicity in the murder of over 10,000 people in what could be Germany’s last Holocaust trial.

Presiding Judge Dominik Gross sentenced Irmgard Furchner to two years’ probation for participating in what prosecutors called the “brutal and malicious murder” of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

Furchner was sitting in a wheelchair in the courtroom, wearing a white cap and medical mask, when Gross found her guilty of thousands of counts of being an accessory to murder.

She was the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for Nazi-era crimes.

Gross noted that justice in the case came “really very late” and only because “the defendant was lucky to live a particularly long life.”

Furshner expressed regret that the trial came to an end this month.

“I regret everything that happened,” she told a regional court in the northern city of Itzehoe.

Gross lamented that she did not give a fuller account of her time at Stutthof.

– “Corpse stench” –

“We would have preferred the defendant to speak – she preferred to remain silent,” he said.

Gross found that “nothing of what happened at Stutthof was kept from her” and that she was aware of the “extremely poor conditions in which the prisoners were kept”.

“There was a putrid smell everywhere near the prisoners,” he said, calling it “inconceivable that the accused would not notice.”

Furshner tried to abscond as the proceedings were due to begin in September 2021 by running away from the nursing home where she lives.

WATCH: 101-year-old Nazi camp guard sentenced to 5 years in prison

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

The defendant was a teenager when she committed her crimes and was therefore brought before a juvenile court.

About 65,000 people died in the camp near today’s Gdansk, including “Jewish prisoners of war, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war,” prosecutors said.

– “The last of its kind” –

Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner took dictation and corresponded with camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe, while her husband was an SS officer in the camp.

Prosecutor Maxi Vantzen asked for a two-year suspended sentence, the maximum possible term without jail time.

“This trial is of outstanding historical significance,” Vanzen said, adding that it “potentially, over time, has become the last of its kind.”

Several survivors of the Stutthof camp told harrowing tales of their suffering during the trial.

Gross thanked them for their testimony, admitting that reliving their memories was “an excruciating torment” for them.

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Stefan Lode, a lawyer representing the three survivors who live in the United States, said they were “satisfied that the verdict has been handed down.”

“Our rule of law brought this case after all these decades and made it clear that there is no statute of limitations regarding murder or complicity in murder,” he said.

– Time is running out –

Hans-Jørgen Foerster, an attorney for four co-plaintiffs from Israel and Australia, said it “doesn’t matter” that Furchner would not serve a prison sentence because the sentence itself was “pleasant for the victims.”

Gross accepted the prosecution’s argument that Furchner’s clerical work “ensure the smooth operation of the camp” and gave her “knowledge of all the incidents and events in Stutthof”.

In addition, the court found that the lack of food and water, as well as the spread of deadly diseases, including typhus, were deliberately maintained and immediately evident.

Although the camp’s horrendous conditions and hard labor claimed most of their lives, the Nazis also used the gas chambers and execution rooms to exterminate hundreds of people deemed unfit for work.

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Seventy-seven years later, there is less and less time left to bring Holocaust-related perpetrators to justice.

In recent years, several cases have been dropped because defendants have died or are physically unable to stand trial.

The 2011 conviction of former bodyguard John Demjanjuk on the grounds that he served as part of Hitler’s killing machine set a legal precedent and set the stage for several lawsuits.

Courts have since handed down several convictions on these grounds, rather than for murders or atrocities directly attributable to individual defendants.