Can a former concentration camp secretary be considered an accomplice to mass murder? The Federal Court in Leipzig, Germany’s highest court in civil and criminal matters, answered in the affirmative on Tuesday, August 20, in a historic decision. The judges upheld a 2022 ruling by the regional court in Itzehoe (Schleswig-Holstein), which had convicted Irmgard Furchner of complicity in the murder of 10,500 inmates of the Stutthof concentration and extermination camp near Danzig, Poland. Mme Furchner, now 99, worked as a stenographer at the camp management. She has always denied responsibility for the crimes committed at Stutthof and had appealed her conviction. The two-year suspended sentence handed down to her in 2022 was therefore confirmed by the federal judge on Tuesday.
The trial, which has been widely followed and commented on in Germany, is probably the last case of conviction in a case linked to the mass murders of the Nazi period. It raises the question of the legal and ethical legitimacy of condemning, eighty years after the events, the “little hands” of the regime for their responsibility in Nazi crimes, while many of their main perpetrators escaped justice.
Mme Furchner was only 18 when she was employed as a secretary in the Stutthof camp management. She worked there between June 1943 and April 1945, under the orders of the camp commander, Paul Werner Hoppe. The federal judges ruled that even in this subordinate position, she could be held jointly responsible for the systematic murders committed against camp inmates. Even workers with modest functions can be legally considered accomplices to the crimes committed there, the judges ruled. This was the whole point of the appeal trial, which concludes years of proceedings.
View of the gas chamber
The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, welcomed the verdict, but regretted that the defendant had not admitted her guilt. “It's not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life, Mr. Schuster said. The challenge is for a guilty person to answer for his actions and find words to talk about what happened and what she was associated with. As a secretary, she was a conscious accomplice in the Nazi killing machine.” Abraham Koryski, a 96-year-old Stutthof survivor now living in Israel, testified to this effect at one of the last hearings in late July. “Those who worked in the camp administration, in particular, cannot say that they did not know. They knew even before anyone else what was going to happen, who would be executed and who would be deported.”he explained in his statement read by his lawyer.
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Source: Lemonde
