97-year-old woman convicted in Germany for more than 10,000 Nazi crimes

After a total of 40 days of trial, a German court convicted defendant Irmgard Furchner, 97, of complicity in murder in more than 10,505 cases during the Holocaust.

Furchner, a former Nazi concentration camp secretary, was accused of being part of the apparatus that kept the camp running. The Itzehoe state court sentenced the woman to two years in prison.

The prosecution accused her of having “aided and abetted the persons in command of the camp in the systematic murder of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her work as stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office.

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The verdict was in accordance with the prosecution’s request, while the defense had asked for acquittal on the grounds that the evidence had not proved beyond reasonable doubt that Furchner was aware of the systematic killings in the camp, implying that there was no proof of intent, as required for criminal responsibility.

In her final statement, Furchner expressed regret for what had happened and said that she regretted having been in Stutthof at the time. The woman was tried in a juvenile court because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged Nazi crimes.

Irmgard Furchner worked between June 1943 and April 1945, from the age of 18 to 19, as a civilian employee as a stenographer and typist for the commandant in the Nazi Stutthof camp in Gdansk, Poland.