Germany’s highest court has upheld the guilty verdict of a 99-year-old woman who was found guilty of aiding and abetting murders in a Nazi concentration camp.
Leading representatives of German Jewry welcomed the decision announced by the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe on Tuesday.
“It’s not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life,” said Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “It’s about a perpetrator having to answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”
Irmgard Furchner – the secretary of Paul-Werner Hoppe, the SS commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof near Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland – was convicted in 2022 of aiding and abetting more than 10,000 murders committed there during her employment from June 1, 1943, to April 1, 1945. She was also found guilty of five counts of attempted murder. Dozens of survivors testified at the trial.
The judges agreed that through her work, Furchner knowingly supported the murder of 10,505 prisoners through gassings, through horrific conditions in the camp, through deportation to the Auschwitz extermination camp, and through forced death marches at the end of the war.
Furchner appealed against the verdict for which she was sentenced to two years’ probation by the juvenile court, where she was originally charged because of her age at the time of the crime. Now her appeal has been rejected.
“This is one of the so-called belated trials made possible by a dramatic change in German prosecution policy toward Nazi war criminals,” Ephraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The law, passed in 2008, allowed prosecutors to charge suspects as accomplices, rather than having to prove that they personally committed a murder. The 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk in a Munich courtroom set a precedent: He was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of nearly 30,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
New laws aim to bring Nazis to justice
Numerous people were convicted under the law in the years that followed, said Zuroff, who also noted that Germany had previously had “a terrible record of prosecuting Nazis.” The law “really changed the whole landscape of prosecuting Nazi war criminals,” said Zuroff, who heads the center’s Israel office and is responsible for Eastern European affairs.
The Nazis established the Stutthof camp in 1939 as an internment camp for civilians. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, they converted it into a “labor education camp” in late 1941 and soon after into a concentration camp. Most of the prisoners, about 100,000 in total, were non-Jewish Poles. Some prisoners who were deemed unfit for work were murdered in a gas chamber or by lethal injection. More than 60,000 people died in Stutthof. The Soviet Army liberated the camp on May 9, 1945.
According to a report on the first trial, Furchner testified in 1954 that her boss dictated letters and radio messages to her every day, but that she knew nothing about the treatment of the prisoners.
In 2021, the 96-year-old defendant attempted to avoid a court date by escaping her retirement home in Itzenhöe, northern Germany, in a taxi. She was found in a local S-Bahn station.
Some of the camp prisoners’ personal belongings are still in the Nazi archive in Bad Arolsen. In total, more than 2,500 personal items were recovered by the Allied troops when the concentration camps were liberated. An online exhibition has managed to reunite some families with memorabilia.
According to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Ludwigsburg, three further proceedings are pending against the defendant, who is accused of aiding and abetting Nazi war crimes.
With the decision announced today, “the judiciary has sent a clear signal,” Schuster explained in his statement. “Even almost 80 years after the Shoah, there is no forgiveness for the crimes of the Nazis. Murder does not expire – neither legally nor morally.”
