A German court has convicted a 97-year-old woman who worked as a secretary at a Nazi concentration camp for being an accessory to the murder of more than 10,000 people.
The district court in the town of Itzehoe in northern Germany found Irmgard Furchner guilty on Tuesday and handed her a two-year suspended sentence, local media reported.
She was tried before a juvenile court due to her age at the time of the crimes. Furchner worked as a civilian typist at the Stutthof concentration camp from 1943-45, when she was 18-19 years old.
The Stutthof facility was the first of its kind established by Nazi Germany in foreign territory – the annexed lands near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk. It operated from September 1939 to May 1945, with an estimated 65,000 prisoners dying from malnutrition, untreated diseases, unbearable working conditions, abuse, and executions.
Her lawyers argued during the trial that the prosecution failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Furchner was aware of the systematic killings of the prisoners at the time. In a short statement before the court, the woman expressed regret “for everything that happened” and her presence at Stutthof.
The trial started in October last year, having been delayed due to Furchner’s brief disappearance from her nursing home in September, on the first day of the scheduled proceedings, and subsequent arrest by the police.
In June, a court in the German town of Brandenburg sentenced a 101-year-old man who served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen camp. He is reportedly the oldest Nazi criminal to be convicted in the country.