Originally published 2021-10-20.
On 19 October 2021, Irmgard Furchner, then 96, went on trial before a juvenile chamber of the regional court in Itzehoe, northern Germany. Prosecutors accused the former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp of aiding and abetting the murder of 11,412 people, plus 18 counts of attempted murder, through her work in the commandant's office between June 1943 and April 1945. In December 2022 she was convicted as an accessory to more than 10,000 murders (the court counted 10,505 victims) and given a two-year suspended sentence, and in August 2024 Germany's highest criminal court upheld the verdict.
Her case drew worldwide attention for three reasons: her age, the fact that a civilian typist rather than a guard was in the dock, and her attempt to flee just before the hearing. This article explains the camp, the charges, the trial and why Germany was still prosecuting Nazi-era crimes more than 75 years after the war.
Who Irmgard Furchner was
Furchner was born on 29 May 1925 in Kalthof, in what was then the Free City of Danzig. As a teenager she took a job as a stenographer and secretary to the Stutthof commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe. Prosecutors argued that the orders and correspondence passing over her desk made her part of the machinery that kept the camp running, and that she could not have been unaware of the killings around her.
Because she was 18 and 19 when the alleged crimes took place, German law required her to be tried in a juvenile court, even though she was in her late nineties by the time the case came to court.
Stutthof: the camp near Gdańsk
Stutthof stood near the village of the same name, now Sztutowo in northern Poland, about 34 kilometres east of Gdańsk (then Danzig). It opened on 2 September 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland, and was the first German concentration camp built outside the country's pre-war borders.
Up to 110,000 people were deported there, including Poles, Jews and political prisoners from many countries. An estimated 63,000 to 65,000 of them died in the camp, its subcamps and the brutal evacuation marches of 1945. Roughly 28,000 of the dead were Jews. Prisoners were killed by starvation, typhus and other epidemics, exhausting forced labour, beatings, shootings, lethal injections and, from June 1944, gassing with Zyklon B in a small gas chamber. Some reports at the time of the trial said Jews and Soviet prisoners of war made up most of the victims; historians describe a broader mix, with Poles also making up a very large share.
Soviet forces reached Stutthof on 9 May 1945, by which time only about a hundred prisoners remained hidden in the camp. In Poland, four Stutthof trials were held in Gdańsk in 1946 and 1947, and several former officials, including commandant Johann Pauls, were sentenced to death.
The flight before the trial
The trial was meant to open at the end of September 2021. A few hours before the first hearing, Furchner left her retirement home in Quickborn, near Hamburg, took a taxi to Norderstedt Mitte station and disappeared. Police tracked her down within hours and briefly took her into custody.
When the case resumed on 19 October 2021, she sat in the dock with a headscarf and a face mask and stayed silent. Near the end of the proceedings she reportedly made only a short statement of regret.
The verdict and the appeal
On 20 December 2022, the Itzehoe court found her guilty of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people and gave her a two-year suspended sentence. The judges concluded that, from her office, she had known about the systematic killing and that her clerical work had supported it.
Her lawyers appealed, arguing among other things that a secretary could not be held responsible in this way. On 20 August 2024, the Federal Court of Justice in Leipzig rejected the appeal, making the conviction final. Furchner died in Quickborn on 14 January 2025, aged 99; her death was made public only in April 2025.
Why Germany kept prosecuting in the 2020s
For decades after the war, West German courts usually demanded proof that a defendant had personally taken part in a specific killing. That standard let thousands of camp guards and staff escape trial.
The turning point came on 12 May 2011, when a Munich court convicted John Demjanjuk as an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor. It was the first conviction based solely on having served at a death camp, without evidence linking him to an individual killing. The 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz SS man Oskar Gröning, upheld on appeal, confirmed the approach. In 2019 prosecutors applied the same reasoning to a concentration camp for the first time, charging former Stutthof guards.
Since then a small number of very old defendants have faced court, in what prosecutors and survivors saw as the last chance for justice. Just weeks before Furchner's trial, on 7 October 2021, Josef Schütz, a 100-year-old former SS guard at Sachsenhausen, went on trial in hearings held in Brandenburg an der Havel, accused of complicity in 3,518 murders. He was initially not named in line with German privacy practice. In June 2022 he was convicted and sentenced to five years, but he died in April 2023 before his appeal was decided.
From Nuremberg to the last trials
The most famous post-war proceedings were the international trials at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946. Twenty-two leading Nazis were tried; twelve were sentenced to death, ten of whom were hanged on 16 October 1946, while Hermann Göring killed himself the night before. Seven received prison terms and three were acquitted. Robert Ley had taken his own life before the trial opened. Twelve further American-run trials at Nuremberg dealt with doctors, judges, industrialists and leaders of the mobile killing squads.
Many perpetrators were never tried at all. Some fled abroad, often to South America. Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina and tried in Israel, while Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor, lived in hiding and drowned off the Brazilian coast in 1979 without ever facing a court.
Cases like Furchner's were never about the length of the sentence. For survivors and the families of victims, they were a public statement that the people who kept the camps running, whether with a rifle or a typewriter, share responsibility for what happened there.
Sources: Wikipedia: Irmgard Furchner; Wikipedia: Stutthof concentration camp; Wikipedia: John Demjanjuk; Wikipedia: Josef Schütz; Wikipedia: Nuremberg trials; Al Jazeera, 20 August 2024: German court upholds conviction of former Nazi camp secretary. Early trial reporting by Reuters.
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