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Germany, convicted former secretary of a Nazi camp: she is 97 years old and had attempted to escape

She was sentenced to two years of suspended detention by the German court in Itzehoe, Schleswig-Holstein. Irmgard Furchner, 97, former secretary of the Stutthof Nazi camp, a town on the Baltic Sea near Gdansk, Poland, was found guilty of complicity in the“cruel and malicious murder” of more than 11,000 people.

Irmgard Furchner, who was then 18 or 19 years old, was the typist of the camp commandant, where about 65,000 people died, most of whom were deported Jews, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war.

To escape the process – which is probably one of the last on Nazism – the elderly woman, who lives in a rest home, had also tried last year a daring escape. Waiting in court early in the morning took a taxi directed to an underground station in Norderstedt on the outskirts of Hamburg. But, around lunchtime, the police saw her walking along Langenhorner Strasse in Hamburg, became suspicious and stopped her.

Prosecutors have accused Irmgard Furchner of being part of the apparatus that helped run the Stutthof Nazi camp during World War II. The former secretary he allegedly «helped and encouraged those in charge of the camp Nazi in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945, in her function as stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office».

According to prosecutor Maxi Wantzen, Furchner, from his office, he could see much of the concentration camp, including an area where new prisoners arrived. He could also see and smell the smoke from the burning of the bodies in the crematorium ovens. Even if she had not entered the fenced-in field in person, the prosecutor added, “from my point of view it was not necessary to know about the mass murders.”

More stories from Vanity Fair that might interest you:

Farewell to Oskar Gröning, «the accountant of Auschwitz»

From Berlin to London by bicycle, along the road on which he escaped from the Nazis

«Hitler’s tasters»: the novel by Rosella Postorino

Source: Vanity Fair

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