‘Secretary of evil’, 97, is given two-year suspended sentence in Germany for WWII Nazi war crimes

A 97-year-old former Nazi death camp secretary has today been given a two-year suspended sentence in Germany over her complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people.

Irmgard Furchner is the first women to be tried in Germany for Nazi-era crimes in decades, in what prosecutors have said could be one of the country’s last trials over crimes committed during the Holocaust.

Presiding judge Dominik Gross today read out Furchner’s sentence for her role in what prosecutors called the ‘cruel and malicious murder’ of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

Irmgard F, a 97-year-old former Nazi camp secretary (pictured in a German court in November 2021), has been handed a two-year suspended prison sentence 

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

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

The defendant was a teenager when her alleged crimes were committed and has therefore been tried in a juvenile court.

She has 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.

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.

 This is a breaking news story, more to follow…