Sentence confirmed against 99-year-old Nazi concentration camp secretary

The German Supreme Court (TS) ratified this Tuesday the conviction against a woman identified as Irmgard Furchner, former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp (now northern Poland), for complicity in 10.505 cases of murder within the framework of the extermination plan of the Jews of the Nazi regime.

Furchner, now 99 years old, worked as a camp secretary between June 1943 and April 1945.

The Provincial Court of Itzehoe had considered it proven that with her work the woman had helped the plan to systematically murder the prisoners and had sentenced her to two years in prison, commutable to parole.

Furchner's conviction is the first against a civilian accused of participating in the Holocaust.

His defense had filed an appeal that was now rejected by the Supreme Court, considering that it was neither clear nor proven that he was aware of what was happening in the field, nor that his work collaborated in a process of systematic murder.

In Stutthof, near the current Polish city of Gdansk, 1939 people were interned between 1945 and 110.000. Nearly 65.000 were killed.

The trial has generated attention for several reasons such as the advanced age of the accused and also the fact that it will probably be one of the last related to the crimes of National Socialism.

At the moment there are three pending proceedings but in two cases the courts have considered that the accused are not in a position to have the process followed.

The Furchner case has revived the question of why German justice took so long to bring to court accomplices in Nazi crimes.

A ruling by the Supreme Court in 1969 - there had previously been some convictions related to the Holocaust - made it difficult to prosecute those responsible by requiring that they had to prove their complicity in specific cases and show a causality between their actions and the crimes.

This led to several lawsuits being filed, including against guards who had participated in the selection on the Auschwitz ramp.

A new twist in legal doctrine occurred in 2011 when John Demjanjuk, a former Sobibor guard, was convicted of complicity in 28.000 murder cases without proving a causal link between his actions and the deaths.

Later, in a review of another conviction against an Auschwitz guard, Oskar Groning, the Supreme Court ruled that it was sufficient that the accused had been part of the machinery of death and that he had helped with his work to perpetrate a crime in a short time. large number of murders.

Since then there have been more than a dozen trials against elderly people in which former victims have given testimony about the crimes of National Socialism.

"It is important for victims to be heard by an official body," said Christoph Safferling, professor of law at the University of Erlangen, who has dealt with the judicial treatment of Nazi crimes in several publications, in statements to the newspaper 'Süddeutsche Zeitung'. .

Safferling considers that the 1969 Supreme Court ruling was a catastrophe that prevented trials from being carried out for a long time. EFE