On Tuesday, the Itzehoe Regional Court in northern Germany convicted a 97-year-old woman of being an accessory to murder in the deaths of 10,505 people as a secretary at the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp during World War Two (WWII).
The court sentenced Irmgard Furchner to a two-year suspended sentence, making her the first woman to be tried and sentenced for Nazi crimes in decades. She was also convicted for being an accessory to attempted murder in five deaths.
In a press release, the court said the chamber was convinced that she “knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp from June 1st 1943 to April 1st 1945, deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp, by transports to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and by being sent on so-called death marches.”
According to the court, she promoted these acts “through the completion of paperwork” at the camp, which was “necessary for the organisation of the camp and the execution of the cruel, systematic acts of killing.”
On Tuesday, judge Dominik Gross said the defendant was guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 10,505 people, along with five cases of attempted murder in the Stutthof concentration camp.
— Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (@gchahal) December 20, 2022
Dubbed the “Secretary of Evil” by German newspaper Bild, Kurchner worked as a secretary to Stutthof commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 1955 but released five years later.
During his testimony, historian Stefan Hördler called Hoppe’s office the “nerve centre” of the camp, revealing that 27 transports carrying 48,000 people arrived at Stutthof between June and October 1944 after the Nazis made the decision to expand the camp and conduct mass murder with the use of Zyklon B gas. He also read out evidence from Furchner’s husband, Heinz Furchstam, from 1954, in which he disclosed: “At the Stutthof camp people were gassed. The staff at the commandant’s HQ talked about it.”
Furchstam was an SS squad leader who likely met Furchner at the camp; he died in 1972.
Hördler also accompanied two judges on a visit to the site of the camp, when it became clear that Furchner would have been able to see some of the worst conditions at the camp from the commandant’s office. In this regard, Judge Dominik Gross affirmed during the ruling that it was “simply beyond all imagination” that Furchner didn’t notice the murders at Stutthof, near the Polish city of Gdansk today.
Last year…
— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) November 29, 2022
Germany tried Irmgard Furchner as an accessory to murder, 75 yrs after she worked as secretary at a Nazi death camp.
America refused to indict Carolyn Bryant for her role in the murder of Emmet Till and lying in court to protect his murderers. pic.twitter.com/zWLWQ25WVt
He stated that she could see the collection point where new prisoners waited after arrival from her office and that the crematorium was in constant use during the fall of 1944, with smoke and the burning smell of human corpses spreading across the camp.
“The defendant could have quit at any time,” Gross opined. He noted that the trial would be “one of the worldwide last criminal trials related to crimes of the Nazi era” and thus allowed the proceedings to be recorded for “historical purposes.”
Kurchner was sentenced under juvenile law as she was 18 or 19 when the crimes were committed and the court could not “make a doubtless determination as to her maturity of mind at the time of the offence.”
The trial took place over 40 days of two-hour-long sessions owing to Kurchner’s advanced age, and heard the testimonies of about 30 survivors and relatives of Stutthof prisoners from the United States (US), France, Austria, and Baltic states.
Kurchner’s trial was delayed last year after she failed to appear in court last September. She was found hours later in Hamburg and detained for five days. Before she ran away, she wrote to the judge that she did not want to stand trial due to her old age and health concerns, adding that she didn’t understand why she should go to court more than 76 years after WWII.
Let’s work together to live up to this heroic warrior for justice and confront today’s mass murderers and perpetrators of genocide.
— SimonWiesenthalCntr (@simonwiesenthal) December 20, 2022
During the closing arguments, Kurchner acknowledged, “I’m sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time – that’s all I can say,” without explicitly admitting her guilt or showing any visible emotion. Her lawyers wanted her to be acquitted, arguing that the evidence failed to confirm that she was aware of the murders “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” It’s unclear whether they plan to appeal the ruling.
She was originally charged with aiding and abetting the murders of 11,412 people, but there was insufficient evidence to convict her for every single case. The investigation into her case began in 2016 with the use of eyewitness accounts.
Following the verdict, which met the prosecution’s demand, state prosecutor Maxi Wantzen remarked, “Only a secretary, you might say, but the role that even a secretary had back then in the bureaucracy of a (concentration camp) is a significant one,” adding that the guilty judgement is “very important for the survivors and for us today.”
Karen Pollock, the chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, noted that the trial had shown that the passage of time was “no barrier to justice when it comes to those involved in perpetrating the worst crimes mankind has ever seen.”
“Stutthof was infamous for its cruelty and suffering… the testimony shared by survivors during this trial has been harrowing and their bravery in reliving such horrific memories must be commended,” she added.
As a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp, Irmgard Furchner was well aware of the mass murder occurring just steps away from her desk. Today, at age 97, she was convicted as an accessory to more than 10,000 counts of murder. https://t.co/yg5ygQRC9z
— US Holocaust Museum (@HolocaustMuseum) December 20, 2022
Likewise, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, emphasised that “it shows that it’s never too late to ensure that there was some accountability for crimes committed of such horrific nature.”
Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that the verdict “is the best that could be achieved, given the fact that she was tried in a juvenile court.”
He revealed that they were “concerned that the court might accept her defence attorney’s plea for an acquittal” as she expressed her regret.
“Yet given her claim that she had no knowledge of the murders being committed in the camp, her regret was far from convincing,” he argued.
Manfred Goldberg BEM, Holocaust survivor and former prisoner at Stutthof concentration camp, was on @BBCNews this evening, giving his reaction to the conviction of Irmgard Furchner. pic.twitter.com/sdQz7GN2Xr
— H.E.T. (@HolocaustUK) December 20, 2022
Stutthof survivor Josef Salomonovic, who testified at the trial, was only six when his father was killed by lethal injection at Stutthof in September 1944. “She’s indirectly guilty… even if she just sat in the office and put her stamp on my father’s death certificate,” he told reporters in December last year.
Another survivor, 92-year-old Manfred Goldberg, who worked as a slave worker at Stutthof, said “it would have been impossible for Furchner not to have known what was going on there, as she claims.”
“Everything was documented and progress reports, including how much human hair had been harvested, sent to her office,” he revealed, adding that he was disappointed with the sentence. “It’s a foregone conclusion that a 97-year-old would not be made to serve a sentence in prison - so it could only be a symbolic sentence. But the length should be made to reflect the extraordinary barbarity of being found to be complicit in the murder of more than 10,000 people,” he asserted.
About 65,000 people died at Stutthof of starvation, epidemics, extreme labour conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, lack of medical attention, and lethal injection (for which a special facility was built). Others were killed in a gas chamber or forced to stand outside without clothes in the winter until they died. This included 28,000 Jewish prisoners, apart from non-Jewish Poles, captured Soviet soldiers, and political prisoners.