Secretary accused of 11,380 murders

BERLIN: A 97-year-old former concentration camp secretary accused of involvement in the murder of 11,380 inmates is likely to escape with a suspended sentence.

During the last two years of the Second World War, Irmgard Furchner was a typist for the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp, near the Polish port city of Gdansk.

She is notorious not only as one of the last living defendants to face trial for crimes committed by Nazi Germany but also for disappearing on her way to court, only to be caught a few hours later.

Stutthof was the last concentration camp to be liberated by the Allies, on May 9, 1945, the day after the Third Reich surrendered. It operated throughout the war and held about 110,000 prisoners, roughly 63,000 of whom died from forced labour, starvation, disease and medical neglect or in summary executions. The dead included 28,000 Jews.

Furchner (pictured in court), who was about 18 when she started working at the camp, is being tried at the youth court in Itzehoe, a town 35 miles from Hamburg.

Under the German legal system she will be found guilty of being an accessory to all the murders that occurred during her time at Stutthof if prosecutors can persuade the judge she was aware of them.

Furchner has protested that she is unfit to stand trial, and her defence lawyer argues that she was unaware prisoners would be killed, which would at worst make her complicit in manslaughter.

Maxi Wantzen, for the prosecution, told the court that Furchner had typed execution warrants, including orders to activate the camp’s gas chambers, and lists of prisoners earmarked for deportation to Auschwitz. He said it was “utterly impossible” that she had not realised what was going on.

Wantzen sought a two-year suspended sentence.

The trial continues.