A German court today rejected the appeal of a 99-year-old woman who was convicted of complicity in more than 10.000 murders for her role as SS secretary to the SS commander of the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof during World War II.
A federal court upheld the conviction of Irmgard Furhner, who was sentenced in December 2022 to two years of probation by the state court in Icech, northern Germany.
Furhner was part of the apparatus that helped operate the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk. She was convicted of complicity in murder in 10.505 cases and of complicity in attempted murder in five cases.
Irmgard Furhner took her case to the Federal Court of Justice after she was convicted in December 2022 by the state court in Icech, northern Germany.
At a hearing in the federal court in Leipzig last month, Furhner's lawyers questioned whether she was actually complicit in the crimes committed by the camp's commandant and other high-ranking officials, and whether she was really aware of what was going on at Stutthof.
The court in Icech said that the judges were convinced that Furhner "knew that by her work as a stenographer in the command of the Stutthof concentration camp from June 1, 1943 to April 1, 1945, she deliberately supported the fact that 10.505 prisoners were cruelly gassed, hostile conditions in the camp", by being transported to the Auschwitz death camp and sent to death marches at the end of the war.
Furhner was tried in a juvenile court, because she was 18 and 19 years old at the time of the alleged crimes, and the court could not unequivocally determine her "maturity of mind" then.
Originally an assembly point for Jews and Poles from Gdańsk, Štuthof was later used as a "labor education camp", where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve their sentences and often died.
From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from the Baltic ghettos and from Auschwitz filled the camp, along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
Other people imprisoned there were political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah's Witnesses. More than 60.000 people were killed in the camp.
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