Irmgard Furchner loses her appeal against a guilty verdict of complicity in over 10,000 murders during the Second World War.

A German court has rejected the appeal of a 99-year-old woman who was convicted of aiding and abetting more than 10,000 murders in her role as secretary to the SS commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof during World War II.

The ruling by the Federal Court of Justice in Leipzig on Tuesday is final. It came four months before Irmgard Furchner’s two-year suspended sentence imposed by the Itzehoe Regional Court ends in December.

She was accused of being part of the apparatus that ensured the operation of the camp near Danzig, today’s Polish Gdansk.

Last month, Furchner’s lawyers expressed doubts about whether she had actually aided and abetted the crimes of the commandant and other senior camp officials and whether she really knew what was going on at Stutthof.

In 2022, the court in Itzehoe stated that the judges were convinced that Furchner “knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp from June 1, 1943 to April 1, 1945, knowingly contributed to the cruel killing of 10,505 prisoners by gassing, by hostile conditions in the camp,” by transport to the Auschwitz extermination camp and by being sent on death marches at the end of the war.

Three more cases pending

During the original trial, the prosecution stated that the trial against Furchner might be the last of its kind.

However, a special federal prosecutor’s office in Ludwigsburg, which is tasked with investigating war crimes from the Nazi era, announced that three other cases were pending before prosecutors or courts in different parts of Germany. Since the suspects have now reached a very old age, questions are increasingly being raised about their fitness to stand trial.

The Furchner case is one of several in recent years that build on a precedent set in 2011. At that time, former auto worker John Demjanjuk from Ohio was convicted of aiding and abetting murder. He was accused of serving as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp.

Demjanjuk, who denied the charges, died before his appeal could be heard.

German courts have previously required prosecutors to substantiate a charge by presenting evidence of a former security guard’s involvement in a specific murder, which was often a nearly impossible task.

However, in the Munich trial against Demjanjuk, the prosecution successfully argued that supporting the functioning of a camp was sufficient to convict someone of aiding and abetting the murders committed there.

A federal court later confirmed the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Gröning on the same grounds.

Furchner was tried in a juvenile court because she was 18 or 19 years old at the time of the crimes she was accused of and the court could not determine beyond doubt her “mental maturity” at that time.

Stutthof was originally a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles who had been deported from Danzig. Later it was used as a “labor education camp” where forced laborers, mainly Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve their sentences and where they often died.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltic states and from Auschwitz filled the camp, along with thousands of Polish civilians who had been herded into the camp during the Nazis’ brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.

Other inmates include political prisoners, accused criminals, persons suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

More than 60,000 people were killed in the camp.