Stutthof secretary found guilty of accessory to murder at the age of 97

A 97-year-old former secretary to an SS commander at the notorious Stutthof concentration camp has been found guilty of being an accessory to more than 10,500 murders during her time there.

Irmgard Furchner, who largely refused to answer questions during her year-long trial, was 18 years old when she went to work at the camp near Gdansk in modern day Poland. She has been given a two-year suspended jail sentence.

Prosecutors say Furchner, who was mainly employed as a typist, “aided and abetted” the Nazis in their systematic killing of inmates between June 1943 and April 1945. In a closing statement, she said she regretted being there when she was.

Around 65,000 people, including 28,000 Jews, were killed at Stutthof, many through either starvation or typhus, with epidemics regularly sweeping the main camp and its 54 sub-camps.

Owing to the passage of time, analysts have suggested that Furchner’s is likely to be the last ever trial for crimes committed during the Holocaust. She is one of very few women charged in later years with Holocaust related crimes.

In the two years after Soviet forces liberated the camp, dozens of former guards and ‘kapos’ of Stutthof stood trial at a special Soviet/Polish Special Criminal Court, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In 1946, 30 ex-officials, including the former commander Johann Pauls, were found guilty, with 11 – including Pauls – sentenced to death. Over the course of three more trials in 1947, before a Polish Special Criminal Court, another 70 former guards and officials were tried. All but two were found guilty and ten were sentenced to death.

Prosecutors have continued to bring charges against those who worked there, most notably again Johann Rehbogen in 2018 and Bruno Dey in 2019. Both were charged as juveniles, given the age they were when they were accused of committing crimes.