The trial of 96-year-old Irmgard Furchner for accessory to murder in 11,412 cases in the former Nazi concentration camp of Stutthof has continued before a regional court in Northern Germany.
A public prosecutor and a law enforcement official who were involved in the investigation against her testified as witnesses. Furchner had reacted emotionally and gruffly and with “petulance” during the execution of a search warrant. At the time, she described it as ridiculous that she was being investigated after such a long time. In earlier witness interviews she had been told that she had done nothing wrong in the past.
Furchner is alleged to have worked as a civilian employee in the commandant’s office of the German concentration camp Stutthof near Gdansk from June 1943 to April 1945. Because she was only 18 to 19 years old at the time, the trial is being held before a juvenile criminal division at the regional court.
She is accused of having assisted those in charge of the camp in the systematic killing of more than 11,000 prisoners through her paperwork. Furchner moved to Schleswig-Holstein after the end of the war and continued to work here as a typist. The pensioner lives in a retirement home in Quickborn in the district of Pinneberg.
According to Furchner, she only recalled having processed orders for gardening supplies as secretary to the camp commander at the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk. She had hardly any contact with prisoners of the concentration camp during her work in the commandant’s office and had not entered the actual camp grounds.
In September 2021, Furchner attempted to escape before the beginning of her war crimes trial, lea her home early in the morning in a taxi in the direction of a metro station.
According to the Central Office responsible for investigating Nazi crimes in Ludwigsburg, about 65,000 people died in the Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps as well as on the death marches at the end of the war.
Holocaust survivors have testified in the trial of Furchner, including 93 year-old Asia Shindelman who came to Stutthof together with her parents Sonia and Aron Levin, her two brothers, an uncle and her grandmother.
“The guards were allowed to do whatever they wanted to us: They threw people against the electric fence, they were killed instantly. Others threw them to dogs to eat or shot them directly.” Shindelman testified from her home in New Jersey.
“The Germans could kill us too.” At the daily roll call, they would have had to line up like soldiers, stand at attention, for hours.
