Nazi typist found guilty of genocide

A Nazi typist has been convicted for more than 10,500 deaths.

A two-year suspended sentence was imposed on the former 97-year-old secretary who worked in a Nazi detention camp. Despite working as a civil employee, the judge accused Irmgard Furchner of being aware of the genocide, according to Sky News. 

Furchner, who worked in Stutthof as a young shorthand typist from 1943 until 1945, became the first woman to face trial for Nazi crimes in decades. According to estimates, 65,000 people—including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish Poles, and captured Soviet soldiers—died at Stutthof in appalling conditions, the BBC reported. 

The victims were shot, starved to death, or given deadly injections of phenol or gasoline directly into their hearts. Others were executed in gas chambers or made to remain outside in the cold without proper clothing until they perished from exposure, according to the CBC. 

Furchner was held responsible for participating in the attempted murder of five people as well as aiding in the murder of 10,505 people. She was tried in a special court since she was just 18 or 19 years old at the time. Detainees were murdered at Stutthof, a concentration camp close to the present Polish city of Gdansk, starting in June 1944. Thousands of them died in gas chambers, the BBC reported. 

NBC News said that death camp survivors and victims' family members, who appeared as joint plaintiffs, claimed that it was not in their best interests for the 97-year-old to spend any time behind bars. 

Furchner broke her silence earlier this month and made unanticipated closing remarks. She apologized for what had occurred and expressed her sadness that she had been in Stutthof at the time. Furchner had previously appeared but kept quiet during 14 months of court hearings, according to NBC News. 

The BBC reported that Furchner fled her retirement house when the trial started in September 2021 and was eventually discovered by police on a street in Hamburg. Moreover, Stutthof Commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe served five years in prison after being sentenced in 1955. Similarly, John Demjanjuk, a former Nazi death camp guard, was found guilty in 2011. Later, a number of prosecutions have been conducted in Germany. 

It is worth mentioning that tens of thousands of Jews from Auschwitz and the Baltic ghettos, as well as thousands of Polish citizens caught up in the violent Nazi repression of the Warsaw uprising, flooded the camp starting in the middle of 1944, according to the CBC. 

Despite some cases currently being looked into, Furchner's trial may be the last to be held in Germany involving crimes committed during the Nazi era. In recent years, two further cases involving Stutthof Nazi crimes have been heard in court, according to the BBC. 

The BBC also reported that Bruno Dey, another SS camp guard, received a two-year prison sentence with a suspended sentence in 2020 for his involvement in the murder of more than 5,000 prisoners.