Former Nazi camp secretary, 99, loses appeal against conviction in Germany

A 99-year-old former Nazi camp secretary loses her appeal against her conviction for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people during the Holocaust, in what could be the last judgment of its kind in Germany.

Irmgard Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 for her role in what prosecutors called the “cruel and malicious murder” of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

Her defense had filed an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice against the judgment, handed down by a regional court in the northern town of Itzehoe.

But the higher court, whose job was to examine whether certain points of law had been applied correctly, upholds the judgment.

“The conviction of the defendant… to a two-year suspended sentence is final,” presiding judge Gabriele Cirener says.

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, some 28,000 of whom were Jewish prisoners.