Ex-concentration camp secretary, 97, convicted of aiding more than 10,000 murders in Second World War
20 December 2022, 10:36
A 97-year-old German woman who worked as a concentration camp secretary has been convicted of aiding more than 10,000 murders.
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Irmgard Furchner worked for the SS commander of the Stutthof camp east of Gdansk in Poland during the Second World War.
More than 60,000 people were killed at the camp, where the Nazis sent tens of thousands of Jews who were living in the Baltics or transferred from Auschwitz.
Thousands of Poles were also sent there as the German occupiers clamped down on the Warsaw uprising, an attempt to free Poland from their grip.
Political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of being gay and Jehovah's Witnesses were also held there.
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Initially, it had been used as a camp for forced labour, with the Nazis sending mostly Polish and Soviet people to work there.
On Tuesday, Furchner was convicted of being an accessory to 10,505 murders through her work at the camp.
She was accused of having "aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant's office".
She was given two year suspended sentence, with Furchner being tried in a juvenile court in Itzehoe in northern Germany because she was under 21 when the crimes took place.
Her defence argued it had not been proved beyond doubt that Furchner knew about the killings.
Furchner apologised to the court and said she regretted she was at Stutthof. She had tried to skip the first part of her trial in September 2021 but was picked up by police and detained.
