A German court rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old woman convicted of complicity in more than 10,000 murders for her role as secretary to the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp during World War II, according to AP News. (Updated 20 August at 01:00 p.m.)
On Tuesday, the Federal Court of Justice upheld the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, who was sentenced by a state court in Itzehoe in northern Germany to two years’ probation in December 2022.
She was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped operate the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk. She was found guilty of accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and accessory to attempted murder in five cases.
At a hearing at the federal court in Leipzig last month, Furchner’s lawyers expressed doubts about whether she was actually an accessory to the crimes committed by the commander and other high-ranking camp officials, and whether she really knew what was going on at Stutthof.
However, the judges of the Itzehoe court stated 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 stated during the initial proceedings that Furchner’s trial could be the last of its kind. However, the special federal prosecutor’s office in Ludwigsburg, charged with investigating Nazi-era war crimes, says three more cases are pending before prosecutors or courts in different parts of Germany. With the suspects now in their very old age, questions are increasingly being raised about whether they will be able to stand trial.
Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews, stated:
For Holocaust survivors, it is enormously important for a late form of justice to be attempted. The legal system sent an important message today: even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes.
Prosecuting war crimes
The Furchner case is one of several in recent years based on a precedent set in 2011, when former Ohio auto mechanic John Demjanjuk was convicted of accessory to murder on charges that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. Demjanjuk, who denied the charges, died before his appeal could be heard.
German courts have previously required prosecutors to substantiate charges by presenting evidence of a former guard’s involvement in a specific murder, a task that has often been almost impossible.
However, prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk’s trial in Munich that aiding the camp was sufficient grounds to convict someone as an accessory to the murders committed there. A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening for the same reasoning.
In the ruling, presiding judge Gabriele Cirener wrote that the fact that Stutthof was not always a death camp that existed solely for the purpose of extermination, like Auschwitz or Sobibor, was not legally relevant. She stated that the “catastrophic detention conditions” and forced labour still resulted in the “cruel killing” of inmates, even if they were not killed immediately.
Stutthof was originally a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles taken from Danzig, and was later used as a “work education camp” where forced labourers, mostly Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve their 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 captured in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. More than 60,000 people died in the camp.
Today, Europe faces the risk of a resurgence of banned ideology, from Azod Brigade parades to confirmations of atrocities by Ukrainian soldiers mimicking German WWII-era units.
