A 97-year-old woman, who worked at a concentration camp in Poland, has been convicted for her involvement in the murders of 10,505 people during the Holocaust. Irmgard Furchner is the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes, according to reports. She was sentenced to a two-year suspended jail term, on Tuesday, December 20, by a court in Itzehoe, Germany.
Irmgard Furchner was a teenager when she was recruited as a typist at Stutthof camp near Gdansk in the then Nazi-occupied Poland. She worked there from 1943 until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. As she was an adolescent at the time of the crimes, Furchner's trial took place before a juvenile court and her sentence will see her placed into juvenile probation, the court had confirmed to CNN.
Furchner was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people and complicity in the attempted murder of five others, the BBC reported. Over 65,000 people are thought to have died in horrendous conditions at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish Poles and captured Soviet soldiers, according to the report. At Stutthof, a variety of methods were used to murder detainees, and thousands died in gas chambers there from June 1944.
The court heard from survivors of the camp, some of whom have died during the trial. When the trial began in September 2021, Furchner went missing from her retirement home and was eventually found by police on a street in Hamburg. In her address to the court, Furchner said: "I'm sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time. That's all I can say."
While Furchner's defence lawyers had reportedly argued that she be acquitted because of the degree of her knowledge as she was only a typist, Presiding judge Dominik Gross had said that it was ‘beyond imagination’ that she could not have noticed the ‘smoke and stench of mass killing’, BBC reported.
Her trial could be the last to take place in Germany into Nazi-era crimes, although a few cases are still being investigated,the BBC reported. Two other cases have also gone to court in recent years for Nazi crimes committed at Stutthof. One was in 2021 when a former camp guard was declared unfit for trial but the court observed that there was a ‘high degree of probability’ that he was ‘guilty of complicity’; and the other case pertains to a camp guard who was sentenced to two-years suspended jail term “for complicity in the murder of more than 5,000 prisoners.”
(With IANS inputs)