It was one of the last trials against an accomplice in the Holocaust.
By AFP
UA 97-year-old former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp, recently sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence for complicity in murder, has decided to appeal, the German court in Itzehoe announced on Wednesday.
The Federal Court of Justice will be responsible for examining any procedural flaws, a spokeswoman for the court said in a statement, adding that until then, the verdict was “not enforceable”. A civil party representative also appealed, she added.
Irmgard Furchner, 97, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence on December 20 after one of the last Nazi-era trials in Germany. Accused of complicity in murders in more than 10,000 cases at the Stutthof camp, in present-day Poland, she had been on trial since September 2021. The conviction was in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution, which had underlined the “exceptional historical significance” of this trial, with a judgment that is above all “symbolic”.
His two lawyers, on the other hand, had asked for a dismissal. According to them, the trial did not prove that she had knowledge of the systematic murders in Stutthof. Aged 18 to 19 at the time, Ms Furchner was employed as a typist and secretary to the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe.
The last conviction of a Holocaust accomplice?
In the immediate vicinity of the prisoners, “the smell of corpses was omnipresent” for its part estimated the court, considering “unimaginable that the accused did not notice anything”. The person concerned said she was “sorry for everything that happened” and said “regretted having been in Stutthof at that time”. In this camp near Gdansk (Dantzig at the time), about 65,000 people, Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war, were systematically killed.
77 years after the end of the Second World War, Germany continues to search for former Nazi criminals still alive, illustrating the increased, albeit belated, severity of its justice.
