A 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary has expressed regret, speaking out for the first time on the charges once morest her in her trial, one of the last in Nazi-era Germany .
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“I’m sorry for everything that happened. I regret having been to Stuffhof at that time. That’s all I can say,” said Irmgard Furchner.
AFP
These remarks made by the nonagenarian in a wheelchair were confirmed to AFP by her lawyer, Niklas Weber, present at the hearing.
Accused of complicity in murders in more than 11,000 cases at the Stutthof concentration camp, in present-day Poland, she has been on trial since September 2021 before the Court of Itzehoe, in northern Germany.
His lawyers called for his acquittal on Tuesday. According to them, the evidence gathered does not make it possible to affirm with certainty that the accused knew of the systematic murders committed in the Stutthof camp.
AFP
On November 22, the prosecution had requested a two-year suspended prison sentence for the former secretary. The verdict is expected in two weeks, on December 20 in the morning, according to a press release from the court.
The trial had started in an incredible way last September when the accused had fled the day of the opening of the hearings. The nonagenarian had not appeared in court, but had left her accommodation in a home for the elderly in a taxi. She was found following a few hours.
Aged between 18 and 19 at the time, Ms Furchner, who worked as a typist and secretary to the camp commandant, Paul Werner Hoppe, had a position of “essential significance” in the camp’s inhumane system, claimed on November 22, prosecutor Maxi Wantzen in her submissions.
AFP
In Stutthof, a camp near the city of Gdansk (Dantzig at the time) where approximately 65,000 people perished, “Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war” were systematically murdered, according to historians.
Seventy-seven years following the end of the Second World War, Germany continues to search for former Nazi criminals still alive, illustrating the increased severity, although considered very late by the victims, of its justice.
Very few of the women involved in Nazi horrors have been prosecuted since the end of the war.
AFP
The case law of the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard of the Sobibor camp in 1943, to five years in prison, now makes it possible to prosecute for complicity in tens of thousands of assassinations any auxiliary of a camp of concentration, from guard to accountant.
Last June, a 101-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (north of Berlin) was sentenced to five years in prison.
