Nazi concentration camp’s ‘secretary of evil’ who played role in 10,000 deaths dies aged 99
Nazi concentration camp secretary Irmgard Furchner has died at the age of 99, German media has reported.
The Itzehoe Regional Court and the Itzehoe Public Prosecutor's Office confirmed to Spiegel that she had actually died earlier this year on 14 January.
Furchner had been dubbed the 'secretary of evil' for her work in the Stutthof concentration camp during World War Two, having been accused of being part of the camp's operation.
She had worked there between 1943 and 1945, in a concentration camp where over 100,000 people were incarcerated and between 63,000 and 65,000 people were murdered by the Nazi regime.
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Stutthof was the first concentration camp established outside of German territory during the Second World War, being located near Gdansk, Poland, being set up on 2 September, 1939 and was the last concentration camp liberated by the Allies on 9 May, 1945.
Due to her involvement in working at the Nazi concentration camp, Furchner had been convicted of being an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases, and an accessory to attempted murder in a further five cases.
In 2022, she was found guilty and handed a two-year suspended sentence, with Furchner attempting to appeal her conviction last year but was denied.
Her lawyers had attempted to claim that she had not really been aware of what was happening in the concentration camp, but as a stenographer to the camp commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe, judges decided that she would have known.
They ruled that Furchner 'knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp from 1 June 1943 to 1 April 1945, deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp'.
Furchner had attempted not to attend her trial, saying she would boycott it as it was 'degrading' to her. She denied ever setting foot in the camp and claimed she did not know what was going on there.
In 2021, a few hours before her trial was due to start she took a taxi from her retirement home and headed for a railway station.
A warrant for her arrest was issued, and she was quickly captured.
Aged 18 at the time of the offences she was convicted of occurred, after the Second World War, Furchner went on to marry a former member of the SS.
The Nazi concentration camp has since been turned into a museum dedicated to preserving the history and records of the crimes against humanity carried out there.
Many of the camp's records were burned or moved, but among the museum's exhibits are piles of thousands of shoes belonging to those who were murdered there.
Topics: World News
Joe Harker