A former stenographer and typist at a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted for her role in the murder of 10,505 people during the Holocaust. Irmgard Furchner worked at the Stutthof camp located east of the city of Danzig in the territory of the German-annexed Free City of Danzig from 1943 until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.
Furchner's trial, the final of its kind, happened at the court in Itzehoe, northern Germany, where she was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence on Tuesday, reported CNN.
However, Furchner was tried before a juvenile court as she was an adolescent, below 21, at the time of the crime. Her sentence will also see her placed on juvenile probation.
According to a court indictment, she was an accessory to murder in more than 11,000 cases. She was convicted of assisting those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of prisoners between June 1943 and April 1945, according to a court indictment.
Interestingly, Furchner was found absconding for several hours before the trial began in September last year but was caught by local authorities within hours. She was then pictured being wheeled into the court, her face with a white mask and dark glasses. A scarf was pulled low over her eyes.
TV footage showed her being taken into the court in a wheelchair with her face barely visible behind a white mask and scarf pulled low over her eyes.
Though her defence lawyers argued that their client be acquitted as "the evidence hadn't shown beyond doubt that Furchner knew about the systematic killings at the camp," the court found her guilty.
In her closing statement, Furchner said she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been at Stutthof at the time.
The Stutthof camp, where Furchner worked, had tens of thousands of people held in brutal conditions. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than 60,000 died there. The inmates were mostly non-Jewish Poles, as well as a large number of Jews from the Polish cities of Warsaw and Bialystok and Nazi-occupied Baltic states. Political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah's Witnesses were also out up there.
Stutthof was used as a so-called "work education camp" where forced labourers were sent to serve sentences. Most of them often died. While some were administered lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, some were shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure or were put to death in a gas chamber.
