In what is likely to be the last trial of its type, a 97-year-old woman who worked as a secretary in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust was found guilty of her role in the murder of 10,505 individuals. The trial took place in Germany.
Irmgard Furchner was employed at the Stutthof concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland near Gdansk as a stenographer and typist beginning in 1943 and continuing until the fall of the Nazi dictatorship in 1945.
According to a representative for the court in Itzehoe, which is located in northern Germany, she was handed a punishment on Tuesday consisting of a two-year suspended sentence.
Due to the fact that Furchner was a juvenile at the time of the offenses, her trial was held in front of a juvenile court, and the court has confirmed to CNN that she will be placed on juvenile probation as part of her punishment. Furchner is now 97 years old.
Furchner fled into hiding a few weeks before the start of her trial, but the authorities tracked her down after a few hours’ worth of searching. The proceedings did eventually begin toward the end of the previous year.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Stutthof concentration camp housed tens of thousands of people who were forced to endure inhumane treatment, and more than 60,000 people lost their lives there.
According to the museum, the majority of those detained at Stutthof were Polish people who were not Jewish. However, a significant number of Jews from the Polish cities of Warsaw and Bialystok, as well as from Nazi-occupied Baltic nations, were also housed there.
In recent years, Germany has hurriedly attempted, before it is too late, to bring to justice the individuals responsible for the war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. However, the experts agree that only a small percentage of individuals involved were ever brought before a judge.