A 97-year-old Nazi concentration camp typist has been found guilty of complicity in more than 10,000 murders during World War II.
Irmgard Furchner was a teenager when she was brought in as a typist at Stutthof concentration camp, where she worked between 1943 and 1945.
Earlier today (20 December), a district court in the northern German town of Itzehoe found Furchner guilty, handing her a two-year suspended sentence.
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While she was a civilian worker, the judge said she was fully aware of the atrocities taking place at the camp, which was located 21 miles east of what is now the Polish city of Gdansk. It was converted into a memorial museum in the 1960s.
Furchner is one of few women to be tried for Nazi crimes in a decades, and was sentenced under juvenile law due to being only 18 or 19 at the time she worked at the Stutthof .
When the trial began in September 2021, she disappeared from her retirement home and went on the run, but was found by police in Hamburg.
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Furchner had previously protested her innocence when reprimanded for her actions, claiming that she had no knowledge of the mass slaughter taking place at the camp.
This claim came despite her being in daily communication with its commander Paul Werner Hoppe, whom she worked for as secretary.
But despite this, the 97-year-old's lawyers are arguing that the woman known as the 'Secretary of Evil' should be acquitted for her actions more than half a century ago as it cannot be proved that she knew 'beyond the shadow of a doubt' about the slaughter.
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Those prosecuting, however, believe she should be handed a two-year suspended sentence for her role in the deaths.
Earlier this month, Furchner told Itzehoe Regional Court: "I'm sorry for everything that happened.”
She added: “I regret that I was at Stutthof at that time."
One of the camp's survivors, Risa Silbert, 93, testified in August to Stutthof’s brutality - revealing that its inmates became so desperate that they resorted to cannibalism.
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"Stutthof was hell," she said.
"We had cannibalism … people were hungry and they cut up the corpses and they wanted to take out the liver."
Silbert said that it would have been impossible for Furchner not to know about the slaughter that took place at the camp.
"If she worked as the commander's secretary, then she knew exactly what happened," she explained.
Topics: World News
Jess Hardiman