97-year-old former Nazi camp secretary appeals accessory to murder conviction

A 97-year-old German concentration camp secretary is appealing a conviction on charges that she aided Nazis in more than 10,500 murders during the Holocaust.

Irmgard Furchner was given a two-year suspended sentence earlier this month after being found guilty in a trial that began last year.

Furchner was 18 years old when she worked at the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk in Nazi-occupied Poland from June 1943 to April 1945. She was a stenographer for Nazi commander Paul-Werner Hoppe, who was convicted for his own role in 1955.

Furchner, who has been dubbed the “Secretary of Evil,” initially tried to evade trial — fleeing just before it was set to begin last September. But after the trial was underway, she broke her silence and apologized for working at the concentration camp.

“I’m sorry for everything that happened,” she said. “I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time. I can’t say anything else.”

The court handed her a two-year suspended sentence for being an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases. She was charged as a juvenile because she was under 21 at the time.

It’s unclear when the German court will consider her appeal.

The case came about because of a German legal precedent that allows accessory charges for people who assisted with the operation of Nazi death camps and concentration camps, even without evidence of direct participation the killings that took place there.

Furchner’s attorneys had argued that there was no evidence she knew about the murders at the camp where she worked. But the judge ultimately ruled it was “simply beyond all imagination” that she didn’t know.