Irmgard Furchner

A 97-year-old woman who worked as a Nazi concentration camp secretary was convicted on Tuesday for her role in the murder of thousands of people, ...

Register for free to Reuters and know the full story In a closing statement at the trial earlier this month, Furchner said she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been in Stutthof at the time. The district court in the northern town of Itzehoe handed Irmgard Furchner a two-year suspended sentence for aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people and the attempted murder of five people, a court spokesperson said.

97-year-old Irmgard Furchner was convicted by a German court of being an accessory to murder for her work as a secretary at the Nazi Stutthof death camp.

[Furchner had skipped the start of her trial](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/96-year-old-german-woman-released-after-going-run-skip-n1280876) by leaving her home in a taxi on the morning it was due to start in September 2021. [German tabloid Bild dubbed Furchner the ‘secretary of evil](https://www.bild.de/news/inland/news-inland/sekretaerin-des-boesen-im-kz-stutthof-die-furchtbare-frau-furchner-77450984.bild.html),’ a reference to ‘the banality of evil,’ a phrase famously introduced by Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in 1963 when reporting on the trial against Adolf Eichmann, one of the primary organizers of the Holocaust. Previously, Furchner had attended but remained silent throughout 14 months of court hearings. In Germany proof of intent is required for criminal liability. Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence by the court in the northern town of Itzehoe early Tuesday for being an accessory to 10,505 counts of murder and 5 counts of attempted murder, a spokesman for the court confirmed to NBC News in an email. [secretary at a Nazi concentration camp](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/96-year-old-who-went-run-skip-nazi-war-crimes-n1280421) was convicted by a [German court](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/germany-arrests-plot-far-right-extremist-coup-military-rcna60481) Tuesday of being an accessory to the murder of more than 10,000 people.

Irmgard Furchner, 97, who worked at Stutthof concentration camp during second world war, given two-year suspended sentence.

No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes. [Poland](https://www.theguardian.com/world/poland), in what was then territory that had been annexed by Germany. Everything was documented and progress reports, including how much human hair had been harvested, sent to her office,” he said. “She is indirectly guilty, even if she was only sitting in the office,” he said. She was tried in a juvenile court owing to her age at the time the crimes were committed. Having failed to turn up at court, she was found by police hours later on the outskirts of Hamburg, after which she was held in custody for five days and fitted with an electronic wrist tag.

A 97-year-old former Nazi death camp secretary was today handed a two-year suspended sentence in Germany over her complicity in the murder of more than ...

She was put in a ghetto with her mother and sister before being sent to Stutthof in August 1944. The testimony shared by survivors during this trial has been harrowing, and their bravery in reliving such horrific memories must be commended. 'We had cannibalism in the camp. No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes. 'In the Stutthof concentration camp, all prisoners, men, women and children, were obliged to work. More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. They had erected an enormous gallows with eight nooses hanging down, then one by one we had to watch these innocent men being hanged.' Furchner had tried to abscond as the trial in the northern town of Itzehoe was set to begin in September 2021, fleeing the retirement home where she lives and heading to a metro station. Others incarcerated there included criminals, political prisoners, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses. From mid-1944, it was filled with tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos being cleared by the Nazis in the Baltics as well as from Auschwitz, which was overflowing, and thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal suppression of the Warsaw uprising. But Manfred Goldberg (pictured), who survived eight months in the Stutthof camp as a slave worker, said Furchner's suspended sentence - which means she will not serve time in prison - was a 'mistake' and is the same sentence a shoplifter would receive But Manfred Goldberg, who survived eight months in the Stutthof camp as a slave worker, said Furchner's two-year suspended sentence – which means she will not serve time in prison – was a 'mistake' and is the same sentence a shoplifter would receive.

"Today's verdict is the best that could be achieved, given the fact that she was tried in a juvenile court," Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon ...

- More than 6o,000 people were killed in the Stutthof concentration camp, either by lethal injections of gasoline, phenol to their hearts, starvation or they were shot. - She was tried in juvenile court because she was under 21 when she committed the alleged crimes. - Furchner was accused of aiding and abetting "those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office," per AP.

Irmgard Furchner, a stenographer and typist to the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, was accused of being a key ...

“Yet given her claim that she had no knowledge of the murders being committed in the camp, her regret was far from convincing.” At the time, it said, she testified that she used to type out execution orders for the commandant, Paul Werner Hoppe, and that most of his letters crossed her desk. [fled hours before the start of her trial](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/30/nazi-concentration-camp-secretary-trial-escape-germany/?itid=lk_inline_manual_8) in 2021, remained silent for most of the trial. According to the public broadcaster Many of the victims at Stutthof died by lethal injection or by the camp’s gas chamber. The trial was held in juvenile court because Furchner was 18 and 19 when she worked as a secretary for the SS commander. At least two cases in recent years resulted in people being found guilty of accessory to murder in German courts: Oskar Gröning, a former accountant at Auschwitz, and John Demjanjuk, a former guard at Sobibor. [according to Die Welt](https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article242272907/Nationalsozialismus-97-jaehrige-ehemalige-KZ-Sekretaerin-vor-Gericht.html). At the concentration camp, Polish and Soviet victims including Jews were encircled by electric barbed-wire fences in a wooded, secluded part of northern Poland’s Baltic coast. Furchner’s case draws on the Others died of starvation or disease. She was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence at the Regional Court of Itzehoe in northern Germany, according to a court spokesman.

Irmgard Furchner was found guilty on Tuesday of complicity in the deaths of 10505 people at the Stutthof concentration camp.

Historian Stefan Hördler previously testified that Hoppe’s office was the “nerve center” for the camp’s evils. “I’m sorry for everything that happened,” she told the court, her face largely obscured by a mask and sunglasses. In his address to the court, the judge said Furchner’s trial would be “one of the worldwide last criminal trials related to crimes of the Nazi era.” “If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000 murders is given the same sentence?” “I regret that I was at Stutthof at that time.” A former Nazi concentration camp typist known as the “Secretary of Evil” has been convicted by a German court for her role in more than 10,000 murders during the Holocaust.

"I am sorry for everything that happened, and I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time. That's all I can say," Irmgard Furchner told the court.

He described the commander's office as the "nerve center" of the camp, BBC News reported. Because she was around 18 when she worked at the Stutthof camp, her trial took place in a juvenile court. Over the 40 days of the proceedings, her defense team argued she should be acquitted, because it could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she had known about systematic killings at Stutthof. According to the court's criminal chamber, Irmgard Furchner worked as a civilian typist in the commandant's office at the Stutthof concentration camp near the town of Gdańsk, in Nazi-occupied Poland, from June 1943 to April 1945. Berlin — A 97-year-old woman in Germany was found guilty on Tuesday of aiding and abetting the murders of over 10,500 people at a Nazi concentration camp and given a two-year suspended jail sentence. After a warrant was issued for her arrest, she was picked up by police in Hamburg and spent five days in custody.

A court in northern Germany gave the 97-year-old woman a two-year suspended sentence for being an accessory to murder in 10505 cases.

"Yet given her claim that she had no knowledge of the murders being committed in the camp, her regret was far from convincing.” Prosecutors in Itzehoe said during the proceedings that Furchner's trial may be the last of its kind. But presiding Judge Dominik Gross said it was “simply beyond all imagination” that Furchner didn’t notice the killings at Stutthof, German news agency dpa reported. "The promotion of these acts by the accused took place through the completion of paperwork" in the camp commander's office, a court statement said. Irmgard Furchner was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, function. The verdict and sentence were in line with prosecutors' demands.