In Germany, the conviction of a former Nazi camp secretary is confirmed by the courts

“The appeal is dismissed (…) the verdict is final”announced on Tuesday, August 20, the judge of the Federal Court in Leipzig, Gabriele Cirener. On December 20, 2022, Irmgard Furchner, accused of complicity in the murders of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp in present-day Poland, was sentenced to two years in prison, suspended, at the end of one of the last trials on the Nazi era in Germany.

Aged 18 or 19 at the time of the events, Irmgard Furchner was employed as a typist and secretary to the commander of the Stutthof camp, Paul Werner Hoppe, between 1943 and 1945. In close proximity to the prisoners, “The smell of corpses was omnipresent”the court said, considering it “unimaginable that the accused did not notice anything.” At Stutthof, a camp near Gdansk where around 65,000 people died, Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war were systematically killed.

If Germany has continued, in recent years, to search for former Nazi criminals. The files still in the hands of investigators are increasingly rare, seventy-nine years after the end of the Second World War. The case law of the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard at the Sobibor camp in 1943, to five years in prison, allows for the prosecution of any auxiliary of a concentration camp, from the guard to the accountant, for complicity in tens of thousands of murders.