Nazi concentration camp secretary dies aged 99 after conviction for 10,000 murders

The former Nazi death camp secretary, once called the 'Secretary of Evil', has died at the age of 99. Irmgard Furchner faced justice for her role in aiding over 10,500 murders and was in the midst of legal battles up until her death on January 14, with the news only recently surfacing in media.

Employed in her teenage years as a shorthand typist at Stutthof from 1943 to 1945, she worked under SS commander Paul Werner Hoppe. Despite her efforts to challenge a two-year suspended sentence for her wartime actions, Germany's Federal Court of Justice in Leipzig dismissed her appeal in August last year.

The court's ruling came four months before Furchner's handed down by the Itzehoe District Court was due to end in December 2024. The lawyer Onur Oezata, who represented three Stutthof survivors, said: "The secretary was rightly convicted of aiding and abetting murder in several thousand cases.

"The now legally binding guilty verdict is particularly gratifying for my clients. They never wanted revenge or retribution."

Because Furchner was a minor during the alleged offences, her trial took place in juvenile court. At 97, she faced charges for complicity in the systematic killing of more than 10,000 inmates at the camp, established in September 1939 near the modern Sztutowo village in Poland.

The court found that Furchner "knew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant's office of the Stutthof concentration camp from June 1, 1943, to April 1, 1945, deliberately supported the fact that 10,505 prisoners were cruelly killed", reports the

Over 110,000 inmates passed through Stutthof concentration camp's gates before its liberation by the Red Army in May 1945. The death toll reached between 63,000 and 65,000, including 28,000 Jews who perished through murder, starvation, disease, or overwork.

Despite her role which involved reporting directly to the SS, Furchner consistently claimed ignorance of the mass exterminations. Her defence team sought her exoneration, contending the absence of concrete proof of her awareness of the systematic executions.

Testimonies during her trial revealed that SS personnel, disguised in white medical coats, would feign health checks to measure detainees' heights, but these measurements were actually for calibrating a bespoke 'neck shot' apparatus. In just two hours, about 30 inmates were executed with this method at Stutthof.

Victims were herded into gas chambers that were then flooded with lethal Zyklon B gas, leading to excruciating deaths marked by intense scratching of their skin and self-inflicted hair-pulling.

She remained silent throughout the trial until she spoke her first words on December 6, 2022, and said: "I'm sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time. I can not say more."

Reacting to her apology, the Holocaust Education Trust said only survivors and relatives of the Nazi regime could "truly judge" her for her "long-delayed 'apology'."

Manfred Goldberg survived eight months at Stutthof as a slave worker, and at the time, Furchner was handed her two-year suspended sentence, which meant she did not serve time in prison; he said it was a "mistake" and too lenient.

94-year-old Mr Goldberg said: "This trial serves the purpose of letting the public know that there is no limitation of time for crimes of such cruelty or magnitude. My only disappointment is that a two-year suspended sentence appears to me to be a mistake.

"No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes. If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000 murders is given the same sentence?"

He added that he thought it would be "impossible" for her not to know what was going on at the camp. Mr Goldberg said: "The entry gate at Stuffhof was known as the 'Gate of Death', entering was more or less equivalent to death. Everything was documented and progress reports, including how much human hair had been harvested, sent to her office."

Furchner's case is thought to be one of the last Nazi war crime cases to ever be prosecuted. As per a special federal prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg that probes Nazi-era war crimes, as of last year, there were only three more cases pending with prosecutors or courts across Germany.