Irmgard Furchner, who worked as a typist at the Stutthof camp in Danzig in 1943-1945, received a two-year suspended jail term.

By JNS

The former secretary of the Nazi commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, known as the ‘secretary of evil,’ was convicted on Tuesday of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people.

Irmgard Furchner, 97, who worked as a typist at the camp in the German-annexed Free City of Danzig between 1943 and 1945, received a two-year suspended jail term.

While Furchner was a civilian, the judge presiding over the case in northern Germany agreed she was aware of what took place at Stutthof, where some 65,000 people—mainly Jews, non-Jewish Poles and captured Soviet soldiers—were murdered including in gas chambers.

During the proceedings, survivors of the camp, some of whom have since died, testified before the court.

Furchner tried to flee as her trial was set to begin in September 2021, leaving the retirement home where she lives and heading to a metro station. She was caught after several hours in the nearby city of Hamburg and held in custody for five days.

Stutthof commander Paul-Werner Hoppe was imprisoned in 1955 after being convicted of accessory to murder, and was released five years later.

Stutthof was the first Nazi concentration camp set up outside German borders during World War II, in operation from Sept. 2, 1939. It was also the last camp liberated by the Allies, on May 9, 1945. The camp staff consisted of German SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries.

A crematorium and gas chamber were added in 1943. Mobile gas wagons were also used to complement the capacity of the gas chamber (150 persons per execution) when needed.

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Because he was 17 and 18 at the time of the alleged crimes, Dey will be tried in juvenile court.

By Associated Press

A 93-year-old former SS private is going on trial in Germany on Thursday on 5,230 counts of being an accessory to murder, accused of helping the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp function.

Though he is not accused of any specific killing, Bruno Dey is charged as an accessory to those committed at Stutthof from August 1944 to April 1945 when he served as a guard there, because he helped prevent prisoners from escaping, according to the charges filed by Hamburg prosecutors.

Dey himself argues he wasn’t a follower of Nazi ideology and that he was only sent there as a guard because a health issue prevented him from serving at the front. He says the killings would have taken place with or without him.

“Surveillance was necessary for the concentration camp to function, and the camp was made to kill people,” Hamburg state court spokesman Kai Wantzen said in August of the prosecution’s argument.

When Dey was charged in April, prosecutors called him “a small wheel in the machinery of murder.”

More than 60,000 people were killed at the Nazi German camp built east of Danzig, which today is the Polish city of Gdansk, including Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Polish civilians and resistance fighters after the brutal suppression of the 1944 Warsaw uprising.

Prisoners were killed by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothes until they died of exposure, or put to death in a gas chamber.

Because he was 17 and 18 at the time of the alleged crimes, Dey will be tried in juvenile court and faces a possible six months to 10 years in prison if convicted. In Germany, there are no consecutive sentences.

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