She was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for complicity in the murders of over 10,505 people. Irmgard Furchner, 97, the first (and probably the last) woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades, was hired as secretary of the Nazi camp in Stutthof, a town on the Baltic Sea near Gdansk, Poland. and worked there from 1943 to 1945. According to the judge, he was fully aware of what was happening in the camp.
Irmgard Furchner, who was then 18 or 19 years old, she was the camp commandant’s typist (Paul-Werner Hoppe, imprisoned in 1955 for complicity in murder and released five years later), where about 65,000 people died, most of whom were deported Jews, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war.
When the trial began, in 2021, to escape the judges, the elderly woman, who lives in a retirement home, he had attempted a daring escape. She was waiting in court, early in the morning she took a taxi 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.
According to prosecutors, the former secretary allegedly “helped and encouraged those in charge of the Nazi camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945, in her function as stenographer and typist in the commandant’s office of the field”.
It took 40 days to break the silence during the trial. Then, finally, the woman told the court: «I’m sorry for everything that happened. I’m sorry I was in Stutthof at that time. That’s all I can say.”
Historian Stefan Hördler played a key role in the trial, accompanying two judges on visits to the camp. From the inspection it clearly emerged that Irmgard Furchner, from her office, could see what was going on. At the trial, the historian recounted that between June and October 1944, 27 vehicles carrying 48,000 people arrived in Stutthof, after the Nazis decided to expand the camp and accelerate the mass murder with the use of gas Zyklon B. Hördler described Hoppe’s office as the “nerve center” of everything that happened in Stutthof.
Camp survivor Josef Salomonovic, who lives in Vienna, appeared in court to give his testimony: he was only six years old when, in September 1944, his father was killed in Stutthof. «He is indirectly guilty“, he said. “Even if you just sat down in your office and put your stamp on my father’s death certificate.”
For another survivor, Manfred Goldberg, the two-year suspended sentence “seems to be a mistake”: “No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the seriousness of the crimes. If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can someone convicted of complicity in 10,000 murders get the same sentence?”
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Source: Vanity Fair
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