In likely the last trial of its kind, a 97-year-old Nazi has been sentenced in a German juvenile court to a suspended two-year prison term for abetting the killing of more than 10,000 people.  

Known as the “secretary of death,” Irmgard Furchner was 18 when she started serving as a typist and aide to the Stutthof concentration camp commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe, during the last years of World War II. As many as 65,000 people died at the camp near the Polish city now called Gdansk. 

Earlier in the war, Stutthof was a weigh station for Jews and others the Nazis considered undesirables — homosexuals, Roma people, Jehovah’s Witnesses. By 1944, the camp had become part of the Nazi “final solution” machine. Gas chambers capable of killing 150 people an hour were built at the end of 1939 and crematoria for burning dead bodies worked overtime. 

Furchner “knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant’s office” at Stutthof, “deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp,” and other methods, the judges said as they pronounced the sentence, according to the Associated Press.  

The judges ruled that Furchner’s “activity was necessary for the organization of the camp and the execution of the cruel, systematic acts of killing,” according to a court statement. Witnesses said that from her office window the young secretary could see the smoke that constantly rose from the crematoria’s chimneys and could smell the burning flesh of human bodies. 

There is “no statute of limitations on the culpability of individuals who played a role the murder process of the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust,” the chairman of Israel’s holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan, told the Sun. “All involved are considered accomplices to these despicable crimes and bear responsibility.”

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Dayan added, “there are many people who never stood trial for their actions. Now more than ever, as Holocaust distortion and trivialization rears its ugly head across the world, these judicial trials help set the record straight and disseminate the factual evidence of the atrocities of the Holocaust.”

That Furchner managed to escape accountability until her very final days points to a German peculiarity: While a new generation is increasingly curious about Nazi-era horrors, previous post-war generations were eager to surpress memories and forget the crimes their parents and grandparents likely committed. 

In the last decade, four nonagenarian men and a 101-year-old were tried in the country on various Holocaust-related charges. Furchner, the first woman in decades to be tried on Nazi-related crimes, is likely to be the last. 

The most well-known Holocaust case was the 2011 trial of a Ukrainian Sobibor guard, John  Demjanjuk. He had been found not guilty when tried in Israel earlier as the notorious “Ivan the Terrible.” After returning to his Cleveland home, America extradited Demjanjuk to Germany, where he was found guilty of crimes at Sobibor. He was sentenced to five years in prison and died a year later. 

Like Damjanjuk, who had lived in quiet denial for decades at Cleveland, Furchner managed to hide, and likely forget about, her teenage work at the death camp. When her trial was about to start last year, she attempted to run, only to be caught after a few hours. She was then wheelchaired into the courthouse in the northern German city of Itzehoe. 

As she was a teenager when the crimes were committed, the 97-year-old Furchner landed in a juvenile court, where sentences are lighter than those given to older criminals. Camp survivors who testified against her were children at Stutthof. 

Furchner is guilty “even if she just sat in the office and put her stamp on my father’s death certificate,” one survivor, Josef Salomonovic — who was 6 in 1944, when his father was killed by a lethal injection — told reporters covering the trial.

A German historian, Stefan Hordler, testified that Furchner could have quit her job at any time. Yet, he added, though she worked at what he called the “nerve center” of the camp, Furchner continued to work for the camp commandant. 

During the trial, Mr. Hordler read the 1954 testimony of Furchner’s late husband, who had said that “at the Stutthof camp people were gassed” and “the staff at the commandant’s headquarters talked about it.”

Throughout the proceedings, Furchner sat motionlessly behind a Covid mask, mum as her lawyer denied guilt. The light sentence she received can be attributed mostly to her youth in the 1940s and her current age. “I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time,” were her only words during the trial. “That’s all I can say,” she added.