BERLIN (AP) 鈥� A German court on Tuesday rejected an appeal by a 99-year-old woman who of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders for her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis鈥� Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.
The upheld the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, who was given a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 by a state court in Itzehoe in northern Germany.
She was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, function. She was convicted of being an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases.
At a federal court hearing in Leipzig last month, Furchner's lawyers cast doubt on whether she really was an accessory to crimes committed by the commander and other senior camp officials, and on whether she had truly been aware of what was going on at Stutthof.
The Itzehoe court said that judges were convinced that Furchner 鈥渒new and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant鈥檚 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,鈥� 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鈥檚 trial may be the last of its kind. However, a special federal prosecutors鈥� office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes says three more cases are pending with prosecutors or courts in various parts of Germany. With any suspects now at a very advanced age, questions increasingly arise over suspects鈥� fitness to stand trial.
The Furchner case is one of several in recent years that built on a precedent established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. Demjanjuk, who denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.
German courts previously required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guard鈥檚 participation in a specific killing, often a near-impossible task.
However, prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk鈥檚 trial in Munich that helping a camp function was enough to convict someone as an accessory to murders committed there. A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening on the same reasoning.
Furchner was tried in juvenile court because she was 18 and 19 at the time of the alleged crimes, and the court couldn鈥檛 establish beyond a doubt her 鈥渕aturity of mind鈥� then.
Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, Stutthof was later used as a 鈥渨ork education camp鈥� where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.
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 in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah鈥檚 Witnesses. More than 60,000 people were killed at the camp.
Geir Moulson, The Associated Press
