Nazi camp secretary, 97, sentenced in Germany for complicity in murder of thousands
- Irmgard Furchner expressed regret as ‘potentially last of its kind’ trial drew to a close; ‘I’m sorry about everything that happened’, she told a German court
- As a teen she worked in Stutthof camp commander’s office; prosecutors said she took dictation and handled correspondence amid more than 65,000 dying in camp
A German court on Tuesday handed a two-year suspended sentence to a 97-year-old former Nazi camp secretary over complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people.
In one of the country’s last Holocaust trials, presiding judge Dominik Gross read out the verdict for defendant Irmgard Furchner for her role in what prosecutors called the “cruel and malicious murder” of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.
Furchner sat in a wheelchair in the courtroom, wearing a white cap and a medical mask as the verdict finding her guilty of thousands of counts of accessory to murder was read out.
She was the first woman in decades to be tried in Germany for Nazi-era crimes.
The accused, whose image the court ordered blurred in media photographs, had expressed regret as the trial drew to a close this month, breaking her silence for the first time on the accusations.
“I’m sorry about everything that happened,” she told the regional court in the northern town of Itzehoe.