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Former concentration camp secretary, 97, convicted of Nazi war crimes
Reuters
German court expected to rule on Nazi war crimes case

[1/10] Defendant Irmgard F., a former secretary to the SS commander of
the Stutthof concentration camp attends her trial in a courtroom in
Itzehoe, Germany, December 20, 2022. Christian Charisius/Pool via REUTERS

BERLIN, Dec 20 (Reuters) - A 97-year-old woman who worked as a Nazi
concentration camp secretary was convicted on Tuesday for her role in
the murder of thousands of people, in what could be one of the country's
last trials for World War Two crimes.

The district court in the northern town of Itzehoe handed Irmgard
Furchner a two-year suspended sentence for aiding and abetting the
murder of 10,505 people and the attempted murder of five people, a court
spokesperson said.

A statement from the court said the prisoners were "cruelly killed by
gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp, by transports to the
Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and by being sent on so-called
death marches".

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Some 65,000 people died of starvation and disease or in the gas chamber
at the camp in Stutthof, near Gdansk in today's Poland. They included
prisoners of war and Jews caught up in the Nazis' extermination campaign.

The defendant's role there was to complete paperwork that "was necessary
for the organisation of the camp and the execution of the cruel,
systematic acts of killing", the court's statement added.

"It is very important for the survivors and for us today that this trial
was brought to an end .. and that there was a verdict which established
guilt," said state prosecutor Maxi Wantzen.

The indictment had originally charged Furchner with aiding and abetting
the murders of 11,412 people, but there was insufficient evidence to
convince the court of her guilt for every single case.

Furchner was wheeled into court wearing a cream-coloured winter coat and
beret, and with a blanket over her lap. Her defence lawyer would not
comment when asked by reporters how she took the ruling.

In a closing statement at the trial earlier this month, Furchner said
she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been in
Stutthof at the time.

"Only a secretary, you might say, but the role that even a secretary had
back then in the bureaucracy of a (concentration camp) is a significant
one," Wantzen said.

Furchner worked at Stutthof, between 1943 and 1945 and was sentenced
under juvenile law because she was aged between 18 and 19 at the time.

The start of Furchner's trial was delayed in September 2021 when she
briefly went on the run. She was caught hours after failing to turn up
in court.

She is the latest in a series of nonagenarians to have been charged with
Holocaust crimes in what is seen as a rush by prosecutors to seize the
final opportunity to enact justice for the victims of some of the worst
mass killings in history.

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