A 99-year-old German woman who worked as a teenager in a Nazi-era concentration camp office has been confirmed guilty of being an accessory to murder on more than 10,000 counts.
In a final judicial review, Germany’s federal court of justice agreed that Irmgard Furchner was guilty of being an accessory to 10,505 murders and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases.
From June 1943 to April 1945, aged 18 and 19, she worked as a secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where up to 65,000 people are estimated to have died.
She was accused by state prosecutors of assisting the SS camp director, in whose office she worked, and others “responsible in the camp for the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war”.
Tuesday’s final ruling is significant as it is the first such verdict against someone not involved – directly or indirectly – in killing, but who served in a support function in a concentration camp that was not a death camp.
In the original trial in the northern German city of Itzehoe, Fuchner’s defence said there was no direct link between her and the killing, of which she was not aware. The camp opened in 1939 as a detention facility; a gas chamber and other execution equipment was later added.
During the trial the court took a trip to the Stutthof camp, now a memorial near Gdansk, where it established that Fuchner’s former office looked out directly on to the camp grounds.
Handing Fuchner a two-year suspended juvenile sentence in December 2022, the court said she “knew and ... deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed by gassings, hostile conditions in the camp” as well as death marches in 1945.
Tuesday’s ruling by the federal court of justice in Leipzig is a pushback against a now notorious ruling by the same court in 1969 that it would accept criminal prosecutions against those involved in the Nazi killing machine only where clear evidence of concrete killings by individuals had been established.
That high legal bar prompted state prosecutors across West Germany to close active files – and police to ignore complaints by survivors against even senior Nazis.
This legal era lasted until 2011 when a Munich court found Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 people in the Sobibor extermination camp, based solely on his service there as a camp guard.
Demjanjuk died while the guilty verdict was on appeal, but it was the first such verdict against someone with an indirect role in the killing.
The Furchner case takes that logic one step further and is likely to play a role in three looming cases against elderly Germans accused of serving in Nazi camps.
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