Irmgard Furchner

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.

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.

A 97-year-old German woman is given a two-year suspended prison term over her role as a secretary at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

She was alleged to have "aided and abetted 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". - Furchner was sentenced as a juvenile as she was 18 years old at the time - It was alleged she "aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned"

Irmgard Furchner is the first woman in decades to stand trial over Nazi-era crimes and the latest in a series of nonagenarians brought before German courts in ...

While Furchner insisted she had no detailed knowledge of what happened in the camp, prosecutors insisted her contribution “ensured the smooth running of the camp” while her handling SS camp commander’s correspondence and dictation gave her her “knowledge of all occurences and events” at the camp. Furchner was tried before a juvenile court in Itzehoe, 60km northwest of Hamburg, as she was 18 or 19 when she began work as a secretary in the Stutthof camp near the German-annexed Free City of Danzig, today Gdansk in Poland. Irmgard Furchner is the first woman in decades to stand trial over Nazi-era crimes and the latest in a series of nonagenarians brought before German courts in the last decade.