97-Year-Old Nazi Secretary Guilty of Complicity in 10,500 Murders

A 97-year-old woman who worked as a secretary for the Nazi commander of the Stutthof concentration camp has been convicted of complicity in the murders of over 10,500 people at the camp.

Irmgard Furchner was employed as a shorth-hand typist at the camp when she was about eighteen or nineteen years old. She worked there from 1943 to 1945.

The 97-year-old is the first woman to be tried in connection with Nazi war crimes in decades. Furchner was given a two-year suspended jail term.

The trial

Furchner initially went on the run from her care home when the trial began in September 2021. She was discovered by the police on a street in Hamburg. For the first forty days of the trial, she remained silent.

“I’m sorry about everything that happened,” the 97-year-old eventually said. “I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time—that’s all I can say.”

Historian Stefan Hördler’s role in the trial was decisive. He went with two judges to the Stutthoff site, where it became apparent that Furchner would have been able to view the camp conditions from her office.

Hördler said that the office where Furchner worked was the “nerve center” of the camp’s operations.

Furchner’s defense lawyers argued that she should be acquitted on the basis that she may not have known what was going on in the camp. They stressed that there were many typists working for the Nazis at the Stutthoff office.

The presiding judge, Dominik Gross, concluded that it was “beyond imagination” that Furchner would not have noticed the rising smoke or smell of the Nazi’s mass killing. “The defendant could have quit at any time,” he added.

Sentence

For her role in the Nazi concentration camp, the 97-year-old former secretary was given a two-year suspended jail term. Furchner will not be physically sent to prison, owing to her advanced age.

Furchner was found guilty of aiding and abetting in the murder of 10,505 people and was found complicit in the attempted murder of five others. Although she was a civilian worker and a juvenile at the time, the judge concluded that she was fully aware of events at the camp.

The Nazi concentration camp at Stutthof

The Stutthof concentration camp was located near the present-day city of Gdańsk in Poland. The camp was established in September 1939. Most of the inmates were Poles and Jews.

Nazis began killing inmates there with Zyklon B gas in June 1944. However, many died from starvation or disease before the camp’s gas chamber was opened. Others who could not work were shot and killed by guards.

Paul-Werner Hoppe was the camp commandant when Furchner worked there as a secretary. An estimated sixty-three to sixty-five thousand people were murdered by the Nazis at Stutthof.

Very few individuals connected to the concentration camps are still alive. For this reason, Furchner’s trial may be the last Nazi-era war crimes trial to take place.