Nazi 'Secretary of Evil' convicted for murders of 10,500 Holocaust victims dies aged 99
A Nazi secretary who helped in murdering over 10,000 people during the Holocaust has died aged 99.
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Irmgard Furchner was an assistant to the SS, the Nazi paramilitary group that were guilty of some of the worst excesses during the Second World War.
She worked from 1943-1945 as a teenage shorthand typist under SS commander Paul Werner Hoppe, and was later given the nickname the 'Secretary of Evil'.
Furchner was convicted in 2022 of complicity in 10,505 murders and attempting to murder five more people during her work at the Stutthof concentration camp.
Some 65,000 people are thought to have died at that camp, which is in present-day Poland. Some six million Jewish were killed in the Holocaust overall. The Nazis also murdered about five million non-Jewish people.
Furchner was given a two-year suspended prison sentence, which meant she avoided jail, despite never admitting to her crimes.
She had earlier tried to abscond from her nursing home to avoid facing justice.
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Furchner later tried to appeal her suspended jail sentence but was rejected.
She admitted being at the camp but denied being aware of the killings. But it was proven in court that she would have had a view of the horrors being perpetrated around her during her work.
Furchner told the court she was "sorry about everything that happened."
After the war, she married a former SS officer, who died in 1972.
After Furchner's appeal was rejected, a lawyer who represented three of the victims said: "The secretary was rightly convicted of aiding and abetting murder in several thousand cases.
Leaders of the German Jewish community applauded the conviction.
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said: "It is not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life.
"It is about a perpetrator having to answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”
"The now legally binding guilty verdict is particularly gratifying for my clients.
"They never wanted revenge or retribution."
Furcher died in January, but her death was only discovered by German outlet Der Spiegel this week.