A German court announced on Monday the death of Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old who had served as a secretary at a Nazi concentration camp and was found guilty in 2022 for her role in Holocaust crimes.
Furchner stood out as one of the final individuals likely to be held legally accountable in Germany for involvement in the atrocities of the Nazi regime during World War II.
She was handed a two-year suspended prison term after being convicted of assisting in the killing of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof concentration camp, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Although she challenged the verdict, her appeal was denied in 2024.
Her defense attorneys claimed that she worked at the camp merely as a civilian clerk with no knowledge of the mass killings, and they argued that she should be exonerated.
The court in Itzehoe, which oversaw her trial, officially confirmed her death. The case gained significant attention as she became the first woman in many years to be tried in Germany over Nazi-related offenses.
Despite the passage of nearly 80 years since the Holocaust, German authorities have continued to pursue justice against former members of the Nazi infrastructure. Still, numerous investigations in recent years have ended prematurely due to the advanced age or death of the accused.
From June 1943 through April 1945, Furchner was employed at Stutthof as the personal secretary to commandant Paul Werner Hoppe. Her duties included taking dictation and managing his correspondence. Her husband also worked at the camp as part of the SS.
Stutthof, which was situated near modern-day Gdansk, Poland, was the site of approximately 65,000 deaths, many of them Jews who had been deported there.
Just before her trial was scheduled to begin in September 2021, Furchner fled the senior home where she was living. She remained at large for several hours until she was apprehended in Hamburg.
Because she was under 21 when the crimes occurred, she was prosecuted under juvenile law.
Germany’s renewed pursuit of Nazi collaborators was largely reinvigorated by the 2011 trial in Munich of John Demjanjuk, who was convicted for complicity in the deaths of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp. He received a five-year sentence and died the following year in 2012.
In 2020, a Hamburg court convicted 93-year-old Bruno Dey, a former Stutthof guard, of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder — the same number as the estimated victims killed at the camp during his time there in 1944 and 1945.
Then in 2021, prosecutors in Germany charged a man who was 100 years old at the time, accusing him of working as a guard at Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp where over 100,000 individuals were killed.
In several instances, those who were found guilty of Nazi-era crimes died before they could be imprisoned and thus never served time.
Some investigations have also been terminated when the accused passed away or were deemed medically unfit for trial.
For instance, in June 2024, a court in Hanau ruled that a 99-year-old suspected former guard from Sachsenhausen was not healthy enough to face legal proceedings.
{Matzav.com}