German Court Denies Appeal from 99-Year-Old Ex-Secretary to SS Camp Leader

A German court rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old former secretary to an SS concentration camp commandant on Aug. 20 over her conviction of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders during World War II.

The Federal Court of Justice upheld the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, who was given a two-year suspended sentence by a state court in Itzehoe, northern Germany, in December 2022.

She was found to have been part of the staff that helped run the Stutthof camp near Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland where more than 60,000 people were killed.

Furchner was convicted of being an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five.

A federal court in Leipzig last month heard Furchner’s lawyers cast doubt on whether she was an accessory to crimes of the commandant and other senior officials, and if she had been aware of what was going on at the camp.

Judges in 2022 were convinced that Furchner “knew and—through her work as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp from June 1, 1943, to April 1, 1945—deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp,” by transportation to the Auschwitz death camp, and by being sent on death marches at the end of the war.

Prosecutors said during the original proceedings that Furchner’s trial may be the last of its kind. But a special federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating war crimes committed during the Third Reich says three more cases are pending with prosecutors or courts in various parts of Germany.

‘An Important Message’

Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews, said in a statement: “For Holocaust survivors, it is enormously important for a late form of justice to be attempted,”

“The legal system sent an important message today: even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes,” Schuster, Germany’s top Jewish leader, added.

Furchner’s is one of several recent cases that built on a precedent established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations he had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp.

Demjanjuk, who denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.

He was also the subject of the Netflix documentary “The Devil Next Door.”

Previously, courts in Germany required evidence of a former guard’s participation in a specific killing at a camp, something prosecutors regularly found almost impossible.

However, prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk’s trial in Munich that helping a camp function was enough to convict someone as an accessory to the murders committed there.

A federal court later upheld the 2015 conviction of Oskar Groening, who was a guard at Auschwitz, on the same grounds.

Furchner was tried in juvenile court because she was 18 and 19 years old when she worked in the camp, and the court couldn’t establish beyond a doubt her “maturity of mind” at the time of the crimes.

In the ruling, presiding Judge Gabriele Cirener wrote that the fact that Stutthof wasn’t always a death camp, like Auschwitz or Sobibor, wasn’t legally relevant.

She said the “catastrophic detention conditions” and forced labor still led to the “cruel killing” of inmates, even if they weren’t killed immediately.

Stutthof began as a collection point for Jews and Poles removed from Danzig and was later used as a “work education camp” where primarily Polish and Soviet citizens were sent to serve forced labor sentences which often resulted in their deaths.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp, along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up by the Nazis following the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.

Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.