A German court confirmed on Monday the death of Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary who was convicted in 2022 for her involvement in Holocaust-related crimes, AFP reported.
She was one of the last individuals likely to face trial in Germany for complicity in atrocities committed during the Second World War.
Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence after being found guilty of aiding in the systematic murder of over 10,000 individuals at the Stutthof camp, located in then-occupied Poland. She appealed her conviction but lost the appeal in 2024.
Her lawyers alleged she was a civilian working at the camp and not aware of what was going on and had argued for their client to be acquitted.
The court in Itzehoe, where Furchner’s trial took place, verified her passing. Her case was particularly notable as she was the first woman in several decades to face prosecution in Germany for Nazi-era crimes.
Though nearly eight decades have passed since the Holocaust, efforts to prosecute surviving individuals connected to the Nazi regime continue. However, many cases in recent years have been halted due to the declining health or death of the accused.
During her time at Stutthof between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner served as the personal secretary to camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe. Her administrative role involved handling his dictation and correspondence. Her husband also served at the camp as a member of the SS.
Stutthof, located near present-day Gdansk, witnessed the deaths of an estimated 65,000 people, many of whom were Jews deported to the camp.
Furchner attempted to flee as her trial was about to begin in September 2021, escaping from the retirement home where she resided. She managed to elude authorities for several hours before being captured in nearby Hamburg.
Since she was a minor at the time of her offenses, she was tried under juvenile law.
Germany’s crackdown on Nazi war criminals began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged with assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp and sentenced to five years. He died in 2012.
In 2020, 93-year-old Stutthof camp guard Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945.
In 2021, German prosecutors charged a 100-year-old man who allegedly served as a Nazi concentration camp guard at Sachsenhausen where more than 100,000 people were killed.
Some of those convicted of Nazi-era war crimes never served their sentences as they passed away before being jailed.
In addition, some cases have been dropped because the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial.
In June of 2024, a court in Hanau declined to open proceedings against a 99-year-old alleged former guard at the Sachsenhausen Nazi camp, deeming the suspect unfit to stand trial.
