Hamburg police have arrested a 96-year-old former concentration camp secretary who went on the run rather than show up at her war crimes trial.
On Tuesday, Irmgard Furchner was due in court charged with 11,000 counts of complicity to murder, 76 years after she worked in the Stutthof concentration camp.
Ms Furchner left her home early on Thursday but didn’t arrive at the court in Itzehoe, 50km away. After waiting for 15 minutes, presiding judge Dominik Gross declared Ms Furchner a fugitive from justice and issued a warrant for her arrest. She was picked up by a police car just before 2pm walking down a street in northern Hamburg.
Earlier this month Ms Furchner vowed not to show up for proceedings in a letter to the court.
“I would like to spare myself this embarrassment and not allow myself be the subject of others’ mockery,” she wrote, asking to be represented by her defence lawyer.
The court rejected her appeal and intends to proceed as planned with its next hearing on October 19th with the reading of the charge sheet.
Ms Furchner was 18 when she began working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, near the northern city of Gdansk, where almost 65,000 people were murdered.
Prosecutors say that, between June 1943 and April 1945, she “assisted those responsible at the camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war, in her role as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander”. They will produce documents detailing mass murder, allegedly initialled by her.
Defence case
Christoph Rueckel, a lawyer representing Shoah survivors attached to the case, say Ms Furchner “handled all the correspondence” including “deportation and execution commands, as dictated by camp commander Paul-Werner Hoppe.
Defence lawyer Wolf Molkentin will argue that Ms Furchner was “screened off” from daily life at the camp.
After a long pre-trial process, Ms Furchner was deemed in good enough health to stand trial – but only for a few hours daily – and, because of her age at the time of the alleged crimes, before a juvenile court.
She is the first woman in recent memory to stand trial for Nazi-era crimes, though she served as witness in other Stutthof trials, including that of Hoppe. In 1957 he was sentenced to nine years in prison but was released after three.
As a witness she insisted she knew nothing of the mass murder at the camp and that she had no contact with prisoners.
The court case is the latest against low-ranking Nazi era officials and comes some 75 years after the sentencing of senior Nazi war criminals by an Allied court in Nuremberg.
Changed thinking
In subsequent decades, German prosecutors declined to prosecute people who did not actively participate in Nazi-era mass murder, saying they could not be found guilty of crimes.
Thinking began to change a decade ago when prosecutors opened proceedings against John Demjanjuk. He was found guilty of being an accessory to mass murder despite there being no evidence of him having committed a specific crime during his time as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp.
Demjanjuk and others appealed but died before they could be sentenced.
In a final push to deal with Nazi-era war crimes, German prosecutors say they have 10 active cases on their books. The next, involving a 100-year-old man, is to begin next week in Neuruppin, near Berlin. Many other cases have been abandoned due to the ill health – or death – of the accused.
