New Delhi: In what may be one of Germany's final prosecutions for World War II atrocities, a 97-year-old woman who worked as a Nazi concentration camp secretary was convicted by a German court on Tuesday for her role in the murder of thousands of people, the news agency Reuters reported.
According to a court spokeswoman, Irmgard Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence for aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people and the attempted murder of five persons.
The indictment had originally accused Furchner of aiding and abetting the murders of 11,412 people.
The court press release said that Furchner was charged with “aiding those in a position of responsibility at the former Stutthof concentration camp with the systematic killing of those imprisoned there, due to her work as a shorthand typist/secretary in the Camp Commandant’s Office between June 1943 and April 1945.”
According to Reuters, in a closing statement at the trial earlier this month, Furchner said that she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been in Stutthof at the time.
Furchner worked at the Stutthof concentration camp, near Gdansk in today's Poland, between 1943 and 1945.
Reuters reported that Furchner's trial was postponed in September 2021 because she momentarily went on the run, but she was apprehended hours after failing to appear in court.
Approximately 65,000 people died as a result of starvation and disease or the gas chamber at Stutthof, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. They included prisoners of war, Jews, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Furchner was convicted under juvenile law since she was aged between 18 and 19 at the time of the crimes.