Irmgard Furchner, a 97-year-old woman, was convicted by the German Court of complicity in the murder of about 10,505 people when she served as the secretary SS commander of the Nazis‘ Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.

She is alleged to have “aided and abetted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there between June 1943 and April 1945 in her function as a stenographer and typist in the camp commandant’s office”.

Also Read| Elon Musk breaks silence after 10 million users vote for him to step down as Twitter chief

Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence for her role in aiding the Stutthof concentration camp to function during World War Two. 

Who is Irmgard Furchner? 

Furchner, a teenage stenographer and typist, was dubbed ‘secretary of evil’ by the German tabloid Bild. She worked as a typist at Stutthof Concentration Camp from 1943 to 1945. 

The defense lawyers argue that she should be acquitted, stating that she was one of the many typists at the camp during this period. She was only 18 or 19 at the time and hence should be tried at a juvenile court. 

When the trial began in September 2021, Furchner escaped her retirement home but was eventually found by police in Hamburg.

Furchner broke her silence and made a statement in the trial. “I’m sorry about everything that happened”. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time – that’s all I can say,” she said.

Camp survivor Josef Salomonovic came to provide evidence in the trial. He was only six-years-old when his father was shot dead at the Stutthof camp. 

“She’s indirectly guilty,” Salomonovic told reporters at the court last December,”even if she just sat in the office and put her stamp on my father’s death certificate.”

Survivor Manfred Goldberg expressed his disappointment with the decision of two-year suspended sentence, saying, “If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000 murders is given the same sentence?”

Also Read| Who is Jeremy Clarkson?

An estimated 65,000 prisoners are thought to have died at this Nazi Camp. The prisoners at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish Poles, and captured Soviet soldiers, were kept in horrible conditions. Many of them died in typhoid epidemics that hit the camp in 1942 and 1944. Those who were deemed too weak or unfit to work at the camp were sent to the camp’s gas chamber. The Soviet forces liberated the camp on May 9, 1945, and about 100 prisoners who managed to escape the final evacuation were saved.