(RoyalPatriot.com )- During World War II, a woman who is now 97 years old worked as a secretary for the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp known as Stutthof. She was convicted of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders and is appealing her case in Germany, where she was tried.
Irmgard Furchner was found guilty by a state court in Itzehoe on December 20 and given a two-year suspended sentence for her role as an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases. The verdict was handed down on December 20. The court announced on Wednesday that appeals had been submitted to the Federal Court of Justice by the defense and a lawyer representing a co-plaintiff.
There was an immediate lack of clarity regarding the timing of the federal court’s consideration of the case.
Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner was suspected of playing a role in the operation of a concentration camp in the vicinity of Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk.
The case relied on a legal precedent established in Germany over the last decade. This precedent states that anyone who helped Nazi death camps and concentration camps function may be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there, even if there is no evidence that they participated in a specific killing. The precedent was used in this case.
The attorneys for Furchner’s defense had argued for her acquittal by pointing out that the evidence hadn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she was aware of the systematic killings that were taking place at the Stutthof camp. This meant that there was no proof of intent necessary for criminal liability.
As he was announcing the verdict, however, the presiding Judge Dominik Gross stated that it was “simply beyond all imagination” that Furchner overlooked the killings at Stutthof.
Because Furchner was only 18 and 19 when the alleged crimes were committed, she was tried in juvenile court because the court could not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that she had “maturity of mind” at the time of the alleged crimes.
