Irmgard Furchner Wiki

Irmgard Furchner Biography

Irmgard Furchner, a stenographer and typist for the SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, was accused of being a key member of a death camp that murdered 10,505 people while there during World War II. . Prosecutors alleged that Furchner, who has been dubbed “the secretary of evil” by the German media, “aided and abetted the camp managers in the systematic murder of those incarcerated there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her role as stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office.”

She was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence at the Itzehoe Regional Court in northern Germany, according to a court spokesperson. The trial was held in a juvenile court because Furchner was 18 and 19 years old when she worked as a secretary to the SS commander.

Furchner, who fled hours before her 2021 trial began

Furchner, who fled hours before her 2021 trial began, remained silent for most of the trial. Her lawyers argued that the evidence presented had not shown beyond a doubt that she knew about the systematic killings at Stutthof, according to German news reports. She previously claimed that she did not know the details of the atrocities that unfolded in the camp where she worked.

“I’m sorry about what happened and I’m sorry I was at Stutthof at the time,” she said during her final statement, according to the German news magazine Der Spiegel. “I can’t say more.”

The conviction, which comes during Hanukkah, unfolds as prosecutors rush to try people for Nazi-era war crimes before they die. At least two cases in recent years have resulted in people being found guilty of complicity in murder in German courts: Oskar Gröning, a former accountant at Auschwitz, and John Demjanjuk, a former guard at Sobibor. Furchner’s case builds on the landmark 2011 conviction of a former Nazi guard, which paved the way for prosecuting any staff member who ever played a role in the death camps as an accessory to murder.

Charged

The charges against Furchner stemmed from an investigation that began in 2016 and from interviews with witnesses that spanned multiple countries. According to the public broadcaster that spoke to her last year, Furchner testified as a witness in other cases in the 1950s. At the time, she said, she testified that she used to write death warrants for the commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, and that most of his letters crossed his desk.

Last year, before fleeing, Furchner wrote a letter to the judge saying she did not want to be tried because of her age and health, according to an excerpt from the letter published by Der Spiegel. She added that she did not understand why she should go to court more than 76 years after the war.

Statement

In light of Furchner’s recent statement in court that he ‘sorried everything,’ we were concerned that the court might accept his defense attorney’s motion for acquittal,” Zuroff said in a statement to the Associated Press. “However, given his claim that he had no knowledge of the murders taking place in the camp, his remorse was far from convincing.”

Investigation

During the trial, prosecutor Maxi Wantzen quoted a former colleague of Furchner’s, Ellen Steussloff, who said during cross-examination in the 1950s that it was common knowledge that Jewish prisoners were gassed at Stutthof, and anyone who said otherwise was not telling the truth, according to German newspaper Die Welt.

Others, like Josef Salomonovic, who was 6 years old when he entered the camp, addressed the court in December 2021 while holding a photo of his murdered father.

“It’s hard to talk about these things,” he told reporters afterwards. “To me, she is indirectly to blame. She maybe she just stamped my father’s death certificate ”.

Wantzen also rejected Furchner’s claim that she was unaware of what was happening at the concentration camp.

“If the defendant looked out the window, she could see the new prisoners being selected,” Wantzen told the court during the trial, according to Die Welt. “No one could miss the smoke from the crematorium or miss the smell of burning corpses.”