99-Year-Old Former Nazi Camp Secretary Loses Appeal Against Conviction

An almost-centenarian former Nazi camp secretary in Germany has just lost the appeal against her conviction for complicity in the murder of over 10,000 people.

Knewz.com has learned that the defendant’s conviction involves her actions at the Stutthof concentration camp in erstwhile Nazi-occupied Poland .

Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old former Nazi camp secretary, had initially received a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 for her complicity in the “cruel and malicious murder” of prisoners at the concentration camp.

The presiding judge Dominik Gross said at the time that “nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her” and that Furchner was aware of the “extremely bad conditions for the prisoners” at the camp .

According to reports, Furchner – whose husband was a fellow Schutzstaffel (SS) officer – “took the dictation and handled the correspondence of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe.”

“An estimated 65,000 people died at the camp near today’s Gdansk, including Jewish prisoners,” the reports further mentioned.

According to the prosecutors, the deceased also included “Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war.”

“Although the camp’s abysmal conditions and hard labor claimed the most lives, the Nazis also operated gas chambers and execution -by-shooting facilities to exterminate hundreds of people deemed unfit for labor,” a separate report read .

She was reportedly a teenager when the crimes were committed and as a result, she was initially tried as a teenager.

It is worth noting that the 99-year-old tried to abscond from her September 2021 trial by attempting to run away from the retirement home where she was living at the time.

She stayed on the lam for several hours before finally being apprehended in the German city of Hamburg.

It was reported that Furchner had expressed regret when the trial neared its end, and she told the court that she was “sorry about everything that happened.”

Following the initial ruling in 2022, which was passed by a regional court in the town of Itzehoe in Germany, her attorneys filed an appeal to the Federal Supreme Court against the judgment.

However, a Supreme Court spokesperson said at the time that the higher court would examine if “proceedings have been conducted properly and substantive law has been applied correctly,” adding that evidence would not be taken again.

On Tuesday, August 20, after a nearly two-year-long deliberation, the Supreme Court decided to uphold the ruling, as the current presiding judge Gabriele Cirener was quoted as saying:

“The conviction of the defendant… to a two-year suspended sentence is final.”

It is worth noting that the 2011 conviction of Nazi camp guard John Demjanjuk set a legal precedent that facilitated a more effective crackdown on individuals with a significant connection to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.

The Furchner case is one of the several cases built on the precedent established by the Demjanjuk conviction.

However, there is not much time left to bring those linked to the Holocaust to justice, as it has been nearly 80 years since the Second World War, and most of the accused individuals are either dead or physically unfit to stand trial.

Notably, the ruling passed in the Furchner case could be “the last judgment of its kind” in Germany, it has been reported.