Germany’s likely last Holocaust convict Irmgard Furchner dies at 99
The former Nazi secretary was handed a two-year suspended sentence in 2022 for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at Stutthof camp in Poland
A 99-year-old former Nazi camp secretary, who may be the last ever person to be convicted in Germany for crimes committed during the Holocaust, has died, a court said today.
Irmgard Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence in 2022 for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp in what was occupied Poland.
A spokeswoman for a court in the northern town of Itzehoe, where she stood trial, confirmed the death of Furchner, the first woman in decades to be prosecuted in Germany for Nazi-era crimes.
Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring to justice criminals linked to the Holocaust. In recent years, several cases have been abandoned as the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial.
Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner took the dictation and handled the correspondence of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe while her husband was a fellow SS officer at the camp.
An estimated 65,000 people died at the camp near today’s Gdansk, including Jewish prisoners.
Delivering the verdict in 2022, presiding judge Dominik Gross said that “nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her” and that the defendant was aware of the “extremely bad conditions for the prisoners.”
Furchner tried to abscond from her trial as the proceedings were set to begin in September 2021, fleeing the retirement home where she was living. She managed to evade police for several hours before being apprehended in the nearby city of Hamburg.
But she expressed regret as the trial drew to a close, telling the court she was “sorry about everything that happened.”
Furchner was a teenager when she committed her crimes and was therefore tried in a juvenile court.
Germany’s highest court upheld the guilty verdict last year. German Jewish leaders applauded the decision.
“It is not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said at the time. “It is about a perpetrator having to answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”
The 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, on the basis that he served as part of Hitler’s killing machine, set a legal precedent and paved the way for several trials.
Since then, courts have handed down several guilty verdicts on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the individual accused.
The Nazis established the Stutthof camp in 1939 as a civilian internment site. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, they turned it into a “labor education” camp in late 1941, and soon afterwards a concentration camp. Most prisoners, some 100,000 in all, were non-Jewish Poles. Some prisoners deemed unable to work were murdered in a gas chamber or with lethal injections. More than 60,000 people died in Stutthof. The Soviet army liberated the camp on May 9, 1945.
The Times of Israel Community.