99-year-old Nazi concentration camp worker’s guilty verdict upheld

A German court has upheld the conviction of a 99-year-old woman for murder for working as a typist in a Nazi concentration camp.

In 2022, Irmgard Furchner was sentenced to two years of probation for aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people while serving as a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp during the last two years of World War II, when she was only 18 and 19 years old.

Germany’s Federal Court rejected her lawyers’ arguments that her involvement did not go beyond her “everyday” activities as a typist.

Its decision upholding the lower court’s judgment is final and not subject to appeal.

“The principle that typical, neutral ‘everyday’ professional activities do not constitute a crime does not apply here, because the defendant knew what the main perpetrators were doing and supported them in doing it,” the Leipzig court judges wrote.

At the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk (then still the German city of Danzig), approximately 65,000 people died from starvation, disease or gas chambers.

These included prisoners of war and Jews caught up in the Nazi extermination campaign.

Many were transported from there to Auschwitz and gassed.

In 2021, the judge issued an arrest warrant for Fuchsner, 96, after she failed to show up for the start of her trial, becoming one of the world’s oldest fugitives.

She is the latest nonagenarian to be charged with mass murder in what prosecutors see as their last chance to bring justice to victims of history’s worst massacre.