Germany court upholds conviction of 99-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary

Germany’s highest court has upheld the guilty verdict of a 99-year-old woman convicted as an accessory to murders in a Nazi concentration camp.

German Jewish leaders applauded the decision announced Tuesday by the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.

“It is not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life,” said Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “It is about a perpetrator having to answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”

Irmgard Furchner — who was a secretary to Paul-Werner Hoppe, the SS commander of the Nazi German concentration camp Stutthof outside Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland — was convicted in 2022 as an accessory to more than 10,000 murders that took place there during her employment, from June 1, 1943, to April 1, 1945. She was also convicted of attempted murder in five cases. Dozens of survivors testified in the trial.

The judges agreed that Furchner, through her work, knowingly supported the murder of 10,505 prisoners by gassings, by terrible conditions in the camp, by transfer to the Auschwitz death camp, and by forced death marches at the end of the war.

Furchner appealed the verdict, for which she was given a two-year suspended sentence by a youth court, where she was originally tried because of her age at the time of the crimes. Now, her appeal has been rejected.

“This is one of what we call the belated trials that were made possible by a dramatic change in German prosecution policy vis-a-vis Nazi war criminals,” Ephraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Passed in 2008, the law allowed prosecutors to charge suspects as accomplices, rather than having to prove that they had committed murder personally. The 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk in a Munich courtroom was a test case: He was found guilty as an accessory in the murders of nearly 30,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Newer law attempts to bring Nazis to justice 

Numerous individuals have been convicted under this law in the years since, said Zuroff, who said Germany had previously had “terrible record in terms of bringing Nazis to justice.” The law “really changed the whole landscape of prosecution of Nazi war criminals,” Zuroff, who heads the center’s Israel office and handles Eastern European Affairs, said.

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.

According to a report on the first trial, Furchner had testified in 1954 that her boss had dictated letters and radio messages to her every day, but that she knew nothing of the treatment of prisoners.

In 2021, at 96, the defendant tried to avoid appearing in court by fleeing her senior home in Itzenhoe, a town in northern Germany, by taxi. She was found in a local commuter train station.

Meanwhile, some personal items that belonged to prisoners at the camp are still sitting in the archive of Nazi records in Bad Arolsen, Germany; in all, more than 2,500 personal effects were recovered by Allied troops liberating concentration camps. An online exhibition has succeeded in reuniting some families with memorabilia.

There remain three more cases of accused accomplices to Nazi war crimes pending, according to Germany’s special federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg.

In its decision announced today, “the legal system has sent a clear message,” Schuster said in his statement. “Even almost 80 years after the Shoah, there is no forgiveness for Nazi crimes. There is no statute of limitations on murder — neither legally nor morally.”