Referenews

Because she was age 18 when she started working at the camp, Ms. Furchner was tried in a juvenile court, which followed the recommendation of the prosecution.

For decades, many people with junior roles—and some with more prominent ones—in Adolf Hitler’s effort to exterminate European Jews didn’t face justice because of laws and precedents that required them to be tied to specific victims to be convicted.

That changed in 2011 when a Munich court found John Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. auto worker, guilty of helping murder almost 28,060 people while working as a guard at the Nazi Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland.

The decision created a precedent allowing prosecutors around the country to bring fresh cases against surviving members of the Nazi extermination enterprise. Because these were very young at the time, they often worked in junior positions. 

In July 2020, a court in Hamburg found Bruno Dey, 93, guilty of assisting in the murder of 5,232 people while working as a guard at Stutthof. Like Ms. Furchner, Mr. Dey was tried by a juvenile court because he was 17 in August 1944, when he started working as an SS guard in the camp, according to the indictment.

In June this year, a court in Neuruppin, north of Berlin, found a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near the German capital guilty of accessory to murder. 

A handful of criminal investigations into similar cases are currently ongoing, according to prosecutors. But more than 77 years after the end of World War II and with few perpetrators and survivors of the Holocaust still alive, any such trial today is likely to be the last. 

Through her work as a secretary for the administration of the Stutthof camp between June 1943 and April 1945, Ms. Furchner knew about the systematic murdering of inmates “in the finest details,” according to the original indictment.

In its decision, the Itzehoe court found the former secretary guilty of providing assistance to those directly responsible for the systematic killing of 10,505 inmates and the attempted killing of five others, a spokeswoman for the court said. 

The chamber was convinced that the defendant had “willingly supported the cruel killing of inmates through gassing, deadly living conditions in the camp, deportations to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, or death marches,” the court said.

Ms. Furchner’s work as a typist “was necessary for the organization of the camp and the implementation of these cruel and systematic killing acts,” it added.

The defense had argued that Ms. Furchner should be found not guilty because it couldn’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she had known about the killings.

The verdict can be appealed within a week, the spokeswoman said.

Historians think some 65,000 of the more-than-100,000 inmates interned at Stutthof died in the course of the War. While some were shot and others were killed in a gas chamber, many died from exhaustion, exposure, illness and mistreatment, according to historians and survivors.