A former secretary who worked for a Nazi concentration camp commander has been convicted of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people.
Irmgard Furchner, 97, was taken to Stutthof as a teenage shorthand typist and worked there from 1943 to 1945.
Furchner, the first woman to stand trial for Nazi crimes in decades, received a two-year suspended sentence.
Although she was a civilian worker, the judge agreed that she was fully aware of what was happening in the camp.
About 65,000 people are believed to have died in the horrific conditions at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish police and captured Soviet soldiers.
Furchner was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murders of 10,505 people and complicity in the attempted murders of five others. Since she was only 18 or 19 at the time, she was tried in a special juvenile court.
At Stothof, near the modern-day city of Gdansk in Poland, various methods were used to kill prisoners, and from June 1944 thousands perished in the gas chambers there.
The Itzehoe court in northern Germany heard from camp survivors, some of whom have died during the trial.
When the trial began in September 2021, Irmgard Furchner ran away from her retirement home and was eventually found by police on a street in Hamburg.
Stutthof commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe was jailed in 1955 for complicity in the murder and released five years later.
The trials in Germany have been ongoing since 2011, when the conviction of former Nazi death camp guard Jan Demjanjuk set the precedent that being a guard was sufficient evidence to prove complicity.
The ruling also meant that civilian worker Furchner could face trial, as she worked directly with the camp commander, and dealt with correspondence related to Stothoff’s detainees.
It took 40 days for him to break his silence at the trial, when he told the court “I am sorry for what happened”.
“I’m sorry I was in Stutthof at the time – that’s all I can say,” she said.
Her defense attorneys argued that she should be acquitted because she was one of several typists in Hope’s office.
After the war, Furchner married Heinz Furchstam, an SS squad leader whom she had probably met in the camp.
She started working as an administrative worker in a small town in northern Germany. Her husband died in 1972.
