From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Germany’s likely last Holocaust convict Irmgard Furchner dies at 99
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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.”
The Times of Israel Community.