The 97-year-old former secretary of a concentration camp was given a two-year suspended prison sentence on Tuesday, December 20. According to justice, the strategic role she occupied made her an essential cog.
With our correspondent in Berlin, Pascal Thibault
Irmgard Furchner was a bureaucrat in the Nazi extermination machine. Secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp, near present-day Gdansk in Poland today, she kept careful accounts of the thousands of deportees and dead who arrived and disappeared before her eyes. The court had even visited the site in November to see what she could see, or feel, from her office.
Over the past ten years, case law has evolved. The mere presence in a concentration camp as a guard or secretary can henceforth give rise to prosecution and no longer only the direct execution of the prisoners.
A position ” of essential significance »
Deportees testified during the trial, recounting the inhuman cruelty that reigned in the camp. Irmgard Furchner, 97 today, testified decades ago in the trial against the camp leader. At the time, she claimed to have known nothing about the Nazi death machine.
During her own trial, she broke her silence in early December to declare: “ I’m sorry for everything that happened. I regret having been in Stutthof at that time. The prosecutor felt that the secretary’s position was ” of essential significance “.
The verdict announced a two-year suspended prison sentence. Irmgard Furchner was charged as an accessory to murder in more than 10,000 cases.
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