A former concentration camp secretary accused of involvement in the murder of 11,380 inmates will likely not go to jail.
Prosecutors have said they would seek a suspended sentence for Irmgard Furchner, 97, who was a typist for the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp, near the Polish port city of Gdansk.
Furchner is one of the last living defendants to be tried for crimes committed by Nazi Germany. Despite being almost 100 years old, she is on trial in a juvenile court as she was just 18 at the time of the alleged crimes.
Stutthof was the last concentration camp to be liberated by the Allies on May 9, 1945 and held about 110,000 prisoners.
Around 63,000, including 28,000 Jews, died from forced labour, starvation, disease, medical neglect and in summary executions.
Furchner was around 18 when she started working at the camp and has been on trial for the last year at the youth court in Itzehoe, a town 35 miles northwest of Hamburg.
As concentration camp survivor and witness Josef Salomonovic, 83, said Furchner should have trouble sleeping at night as he gave harrowing testimony of his own experiences.
He said he survived eight concentration camps as a child, including Auschwitz, but said Stutthof was the worst.
"I was classified as a parasite. Everyone who couldn't work was a parasite," he told the court.
"I got into the cattle wagon and of course, I didn't know we were going to Auschwitz or that this was the last time I would see my father. He kissed me."
If it transpires that Furchner was aware of the brutal killings during her tenure working there, she will be found guilty of being an accessory to all the murders that occurred.
However, her lawyers are arguing she is unfit to stand trial and that she was unaware prisoners would be killed, meaning that at most she would have been complicit in manslaughter.
Prosecutor Maxi Wantzen told the court that she had typed up execution warrants, orders for the operation of the camp’s gas chambers and lists of prisoners earmarked for deportation to Auschwitz.
Therefore it is “utterly impossible” that she had not realised what was going on.
Mr Wantzen also said that the defendant would have been able to see large parts of the camp from her office and probably could see and smell smoke from the burning of bodies at the crematorium.
The prosecution case against Ms Furchner is happening because of the trial of a former camp guard who was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murders of 28,000 people.
This set a new legal precedent and the judge at the time said regardless of how small a person’s role had been, as long as it could be proven they had been “cogs” in the “machinery of destruction”, they could be held responsible for the crimes committed.
