A 99-YEAR-OLD convicted over her role in 10,000 horrific concentration camp murders during World War II has lost her appeal bid.
Irmgard Furchner, known as the “Secretary of Evil”, worked for the SS commander of the infamous Stutthof camp in Poland’s north.
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At a federal court hearing last month in Leipzig, Furchner’s lawyers tried to cast doubt over whether she should be considered an accessory to the horrific things committed at the camp.
This also included arguing that there was apparently no clear evidence she had any idea about the horrific killings at the camp.
But today the court rejected 99-year-old Irmgard Furchner’s appeal against a conviction of complicity in the murders – and the ruling is final.
It came four months before Furchner’s two-year-suspended sentence handed down by the Itzehoe District Court ends in December.
Lawyer Onur Oezata, 40, who represented three Stutthof survivors in court, said: “The secretary was rightly convicted of aiding and abetting murder in several thousand cases.
“The now legally binding guilty verdict is particularly gratifying for my clients. They never wanted revenge or retribution.”
Furchner was tried in a juvenile court as she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes.
She worked as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander
Paul Werne-Hoppe between June 1943 and April 1945.
The Nazi was charged with aiding the murder of over 10,000 prisoners at the camp, where she worked from June 1943 to April 1945.
Since the beginning of the trial, Furchner claimed she was not aware of the mass killings – despite her job as secretary of the camp’s commander.
This meant she reported directly to the murderous SS.
Prosecutors had earlier requested she be sentenced to just two years probation if found guilty.
Furchner had meanwhile remained practically silent in presumed shame since the beginning of the trial on September 30 2021.
She spoke her first words on December 6, saying: “I’m sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time.
“I cannot say more.”
Furchner made headlines last year in September after she left her retirement home, jumped into a taxi and attempted to go on the run.
But the police arrested her just hours later by cops as she walked along Langenhorner Chaussee – a road leading into Hamburg.
What happened at Stutthof?
STUTTENHOF was a concentration camp that was responsible for tens of thousands of murders.
The camp was built in September 1939 near what is now Sztutow village, in what was then occupied Poland.
Initially it was labeled a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police, before becoming a “labour education” camp in November 1941.
But in January 1942 it became a systematic concentration camp.
Tens of thousands of people were deported to the Stutthof camp, made up of mainly non-Jewish Poles, Holocaust Encyclopedia reports.
It accommodated more than 110,000 prisoners until it was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945.
Conditions on the murderous site were horrific, with many prisoners dying in epidemics at the camp in the winter of 1942 and 1944.
Between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners – of which 28,000 were Jews – were murdered or died of starvation, disease, and after being worked to death in the camp.
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