Irmgard Furchner, convicted in 2022 of complicity in Nazi crimes, dies at 99
Furchner is likely the last person to be convicted of direct complicity in the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago
Irmgard Furchner, a former secretary for the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, arrives with her lawyers during her trial in Itzehoe, Germany, Dec. 6, 2022. German courts require the face of defendants to be obscured in photographs. (Marcus Brandt/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
(JTA) — A German woman who was convicted at age 97 of aiding in the murder of 10,500 people during the Holocaust has died at 99.
Irmgard Furchner’s death was announced by the court in northern Germany that determined last year that she was an accessory to thousands of murders that took place at a Nazi concentration camp between 1943 and 1945.
“It is not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said at the time. “It is about a perpetrator having to answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”
Furchner had tried to avoid appearing in court by fleeing her senior home in Itzenhoe, a town in northern Germany, by taxi, the previous year. She was found in a local commuter train station.
Furchner — who was a secretary to Paul-Werner Hoppe, the SS commander of Stutthof, located outside Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland — was also convicted of attempted murder in five cases after a trial in which dozens of survivors testified.
The judges agreed that Furchner, through her work, knowingly supported the murder of 10,505 prisoners by gassings, by terrible conditions in the camp, by transfer to the Auschwitz death camp and by forced death marches at the end of the war.
She was given a two-year suspended sentence by a youth court, where she was originally tried because of her age at the time of the crimes.
“I am sorry for everything that happened,” she said after she was sentenced, in a statement that local news reports said had been a surprise. “I regret that I was in Stutthof at that time. That’s all I can say.”
Furchner appealed the verdict. Last year, her appeal was rejected. She was likely the last person to be convicted of direct complicity in the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago.
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