Nazi ‘Secretary of evil’ appeals her two-year suspended jail sentence for concentration camp murders

A 97-year-old woman is appealing against her conviction in Germany of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders when she was a secretary to the commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during the Second World War.

On December 20 the Itzehoe state court in northern Germany gave Irmgard Furchner a two-year suspended sentence for being an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases.

The court said on Wednesday that both the defence and a lawyer for a co-plaintiff filed appeals to the Federal Court of Justice.

It was not immediately clear when the federal court will consider the case.

Pictured: Defendant Irmgard F, a former secretary for the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, is brought to a courtroom in Itzehoe, northern Germany, where her verdict was spoken on December 20, 2022

Furchner was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, function between June 1943 and April 1945.

The case relied on a German legal precedent established over the last decade that allows anyone who helped Nazi death camps and concentration camps function to be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there, even without evidence of participation in a specific killing.

Defence lawyers had sought Furchner’s acquittal, arguing that the evidence had not shown beyond doubt that she knew about the systematic killings at the Stutthof camp, meaning there was no proof of intent as required for criminal liability.

Pictured: The former Nazi secretary Irmgard Furchner around 1944 (Newsflash)

But presiding judge Dominik Gross said as he announced the verdict that it was ‘simply beyond all imagination’ that Furchner did not notice the killings at Stutthof.

Furchner was tried in juvenile court because she was 18 and 19 when the alleged crimes were committed and the court could not establish beyond a doubt her ‘maturity of mind’ at the time.

Manfred Goldberg, who survived eight months in the Stutthof camp as a slave worker, said Furchner’s two-year suspended sentence – which means she will not serve time in prison – was a ‘mistake’ and is too lenient. 

Mr Goldberg, 92, said: ‘This trial serves the purpose of letting the public know that there is no limitation of time for crimes of such cruelty or magnitude.

‘My only disappointment is that a two-year suspended appears to me to be a mistake. No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes.

‘If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000 murders is given the same sentence?’

Presiding judge Dominik Gross today read out Furchner’s sentence for her role in what prosecutors called the ‘cruel and malicious murder’ of more than 10,000 prisoners

Mr Goldberg said he believed it would be ‘impossible’ for Furchner to not know what was going on at Stutthof camp, as she claimed.

He said: ‘The entry gate of Stutthof was known as the ‘Gate of Death’, entering was more or less equivalent to death.

‘Everything was documented and progress reports, including how much human hair had been harvested, sent to her office.’

Furchner was 18 when she started work at the camp on the Baltic coast and prosecutors said she was informed ‘down to the last detail’ about the murder methods practised there.

But Manfred Goldberg (pictured), who survived eight months in the Stutthof camp as a slave worker, said Furchner’s suspended sentence – which means she will not serve time in prison –  was a ‘mistake’ and is the same sentence a shoplifter would receive

In her closing statement, Furchner said she was ‘sorry’ for what had happened and regretted that she had been at Stutthof at the time.

‘I’m sorry about everything that happened,’ Furchner said at the court in the northern town of Itzehoe, breaking her 14-month long silence.

‘I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time,’ she added.

Reacting to Furchner’s apology, the Holocaust Educational Trust said that only survivors and relatives of the Nazi genocide could ‘truly judge’ her for her ‘long-delayed “apology”‘.

Furchner had tried to abscond as the trial in the northern town of Itzehoe was set to begin in September 2021, fleeing the retirement home where she lives and heading to a metro station.

The pensioner managed to evade police for several hours before being apprehended in the nearby city of Hamburg and held in custody for five days.

During the trial, the court heard how SS men in white medical uniforms would pretend to be doctors who were simply measuring prisoners’ height.

But instead, the prisoner’s height was used as the setting for a specially engineered ‘neck shot’ device.

Around 30 prisoners were then shot in the neck within a two-hour period.

In other cases, prisoners were forced into chambers which were filled with poisonous Zyklon B gas.

Here prisoners screamed in agony, scratched at their skin until it was red raw, and even pulled their own hair out.

Furchner, born Irmgard Dirksen on May 19, 1925, worked as secretary for the concentration camp commandant Paul Werner Hoppe.

Irmgard Furchner was wheeled out to hear her sentence in a courtroom in Itzehoe, Germany, on December 20

The prosecutor described how on July 22, 1944, SS Obersturmbahnführer Paul Maurer gave orders that a group of prisoners at Stutthof be transported to Auschwitz for extermination.

Four days later, a list of prisoners to be transferred was written at the commandant’s office at Stutthof.

At 6.05pm, commandant Hoppe, then gave confirmation by radio that the transport was en route.

The prosecution then claimed that this message must have been written by Furchner.

During her trial, Furchner claimed that despite working in the camp’s command block, she knew nothing of its murderous regime.

But it has been revealed during her trial that her husband – who was a Nazi SS soldier during World War II – testified in 1954 that he was aware that people had been gassed at the concentration camp.

Prosecutors in Itzehoe said during the proceedings that Furchner’s trial may be the last of its kind.

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The Stutthof camp was established in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, and enlarged in 1943 with a new camp surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences

However, a special federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes says another five cases are currently pending with prosecutors in various parts of Germany, where charges of murder and accessory to murder are not subject to a statute of limitations.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig Stutthof was used as a Nazi so-called ‘work education camp’ from around 1940 where forced labourers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, 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.

During the trial, several Stutthof survivors offered accounts of their experiences at the camp. One survivor – Risa Silbert, 93 – told the trial on August 30 that cannibalism was commonplace among starving prisoners.

During her trial, countless survivors of the Stuffhof camp recounted how Nazi guards brutalised the tens of thousands of inmates there

Speaking via video link from Australia where she now resides, Ms Silbert told the Itzehoe district court at the time: ‘Stutthof was hell.

‘We had cannibalism in the camp. People were hungry and they cut up the corpses and they wanted to take out the liver.’ Ms Silbert – born in 1929 to a Jewish family in Klaipeda, a port city in Lithuania – added: ‘It was every day.’

In her grim testimony, she told how her father and brother were murdered by German collaborators in Kaunas – a city in her homeland – in 1941. She was put in a ghetto with her mother and sister before being sent to Stutthof in August 1944.

Every morning, prisoners had to report at 4am or 5am. Those who could not stand still were whipped mercilessly by the SS guards, she told the trial.

Karen Pollock CBE, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said after Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence: ‘This trial has showed once more that the passage of time is no barrier to justice when it comes to those involved in perpetrating the worst crimes mankind have ever seen.’

She added: ‘Stutthof was infamous for its cruelty and suffering, with Holocaust survivors calling it “hell on earth”. The testimony shared by survivors during this trial has been harrowing, and their bravery in reliving such horrific memories must be commended.

‘While Furchner will keep her freedom, this was stolen from over 60,000 Jewish victims ruthlessly murdered by the Nazis at Stutthof.

‘This trial is further proof – if needed – of the heinous crimes which took place during the Holocaust.’