Irmgard Furchner, who worked as a stenographer and typist for the Nazi commander of Stutthof concentration camp during World War II, has been found guilty of ‘aiding and abetting’ the killing of over 10,000 people and complicity in the attempted murder of five more.
For inciting the murder of 10,505 individuals and the attempted murder of five more, a 97-year-old woman who served as a Nazi concentration camp secretary was given a two-year suspended sentence. This case could be one of Germany's last trials conducted for World War II crimes.
From 1943 until the fall of the Nazi dictatorship in 1945, the lady, Irmgard Furchner, worked as a stenographer and typewriter in the Stutthof camp outside Gdansk in Nazi-occupied Poland. In the camp's gas chamber, around 65,000 people perished from sickness and malnutrition.
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More than 60,000 people were killed in the Stutthof concentration camp, either by lethal injections of gasoline, phenol to their hearts, starvation or they were shot. Others were sent to the camp's gas chamber or were forced outside without clothes in winter until they died of exposure.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, they were war captives and Jews involved in the Nazis' extermination programme.
The captives were "cruelly slaughtered by gassings, by hostile circumstances in the camp, by transportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, and by being transported on so-called death marches," according to the court.
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According to the court, Furchner's role at the camp was to complete paperwork that "was necessary for the organisation of the camp and the execution of the cruel, systematic acts of killing."
Furchner apologised for what had transpired and expressed remorse that she had been in the camp at the time in her closing statement earlier this month. Furchner, dubbed “the secretary of evil” by German media, has previously claimed she was not aware of the details of the atrocities that took place in the Stutthof camp, as per The Washington Post.
(Photo: @JanoPL5 | Twitter)
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