German prosecutors seek suspended sentence for ex-Nazi camp secretary

German prosecutors said Tuesday they were seeking a two-year suspended sentence for a 97-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary in what they described as one of the last trials of its kind.

Public prosecutor Maxi Wantzen told the regional court in the northern town of Itzehoe that Irmgard Furchner was guilty of complicity in the "cruel and malicious murder" of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland.

The first woman to be tried in Germany for Nazi-era crimes in decades, Furchner sat impassively in a wheelchair in the courtroom, wearing a red beret and jacket.

Furchner had fled the retirement home where she lives in September 2021 as her trial was set to begin, and headed to a metro station.

She managed to evade police for several hours before being apprehended in the nearby city of Hamburg and held in custody for five days.

The pensioner has declined to testify to the court since her trial began last October but several survivors of the Stutthof camp have offered wrenching accounts of their suffering.

Wantzen thanked the witness, many of whom are also serving as co-plaintiffs.

"This trial is of outstanding historical importance," she said, adding that it was "potentially, due to the passage of time, the last of its kind".

Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner worked in the office of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe. According to the case against her, she took dictation of the SS officer's orders and handled his correspondence.

An estimated 65,000 people died at the Stutthof camp near today's Gdansk, including "Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war", according to the indictment read out by Wantzen at the start of proceedings.

Wantzen told the judges that the defendant's clerical work "assured the smooth running of the camp" and gave her "knowledge of all occurrences and events at Stutthof".

Moreover, "life-threatening conditions" such as food and water shortages and the spread of deadly diseases including typhus were intentionally maintained and immediately apparent, she said.

Seventy-seven years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring alleged criminals linked to the Nazis' crimes to justice.

In recent years, several cases have been abandoned as the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial.