A German court today rejected an appeal against the conviction of 99-year-old Irmgard Furchner, who was found complicit in more than 10,000 murders in her role as secretary to an SS commander at the Stutthof concentration camp during The Second World War, reports the Associated Press, quoted by BTA.
The federal court upheld the sentence of Furchner, who in December 2022 was given a two-year suspended sentence by a court in the city of Itcho in the state of Schleswig-Holstein.
The woman was accused of contributing to the functioning of the Nazi concentration camp on the territory of modern Poland near the city of Gdansk. The German woman was found guilty of accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and accessory to attempted murder in five cases.
At a hearing at the Federal Court in Leipzig last month, Furchner's lawyers questioned whether she was really complicit in the murders carried out by the camp commander and other high-ranking officials, and whether she was really aware of what was going on at Stutthof.
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The court in Itzho said the judges were convinced that Furchner “knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the office of the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp from June 1, 1943 to April 1, 1945, deliberately supported the fact , that 10,505 prisoners were brutally murdered by gassing, harsh conditions in the camp, by transport to the Auschwitz death camp, and by sending the prisoners on death marches towards the end of the war.
During the initial investigation, prosecutors said Furchner's case might be the last of its kind, although the central prosecutor's office of the State Judicial Administration for the Investigation of National Socialism Crimes in Ludwigsburg said three more cases were pending. examination in different parts of the country.
Initially, Stutthof served as an assembly point for Jews and other Poles to be taken out of Gdańsk, and later assumed the function of a “educational labor camp”, where workers, mostly workers, were forcibly sent to serve their sentences citizens of Poland and the Soviet Union, many of whom died there.
From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from the Baltic ghettos and from Auschwitz were sent to the camp, along with thousands of Poles involved in the Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. More than 60,000 people were killed in Stutthof.