In what could be one of the country’s final prosecutions for World War II crimes, a 97-year-old woman who worked as a Nazi concentration camp secretary was convicted on Tuesday for her role in the murder of thousands of people.
According to a court spokeswoman, Irmgard Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence for aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 individuals and the attempted murder of five people.
The detainees were ‘cruelly executed through gassings, inhospitable conditions in the camp, transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, and being sent on so-called death marches,’ according to a court statement.
At the camp in Stutthof, near Gdansk in today’s Poland, approximately 65,000 people died from malnutrition and disease, or in the gas chamber. POWs and Jews caught up in the Nazi extermination campaign were among them.
The defendant’s function there was to prepare paperwork ‘required for the organisation of the camp and the execution of the horrific, methodical acts of killing,’ according to the court’s statement.
‘It is incredibly significant for the survivors and for us today that this trial was concluded… and that there was a judgement that demonstrated culpability,’ state prosecutor Maxi Wantzen said.
Furchner was originally charged with aiding and abetting the murders of 11,412 persons, but there was insufficient evidence to convict her in every single case.
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