Former Nazi camp secretary goes on trial over
murders of 11,000 people
Irmgard Furchner, who tried to flee last month, is
accused of complicity in killings at Stutthof death camp
Kate
Connolly in Itzehoe
Tue 19 Oct
2021 17.33 BST
A
96-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp has gone on trial in
Germany for alleged complicity in the murder of more than 11,000 people
imprisoned there, three weeks after she attempted to flee the proceedings.
Irmgard
Furchner was pushed into the court in Itzehoe, northern Germany, strapped into
a blue ambulance wheelchair and clutching a brown cloth bag. A silk patterned
scarf, sunglasses and a medical mask covered her face.
Furchner,
who was 18 when she started working at Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland as
the secretary to its commandant, Paul Werner Hoppe, is being tried in a
juvenile court due to her age when the alleged crimes were committed.
After
trying to escape the trial in late September, leaving the retirement home in
Quickborn where she lives and travelling by taxi to the outskirts of Hamburg,
she was arrested several hours later and placed in police custody for five days
before being fitted with an electronic wrist tag.
She was
shielded by sheets as she entered the ambulance that brought her to the court
on Tuesday morning. The trial has been moved to a prefab warehouse on the
town’s outskirts to cope with the considerable interest in it and the extensive
security involved.
When asked
by the judge to do so, Furchner removed her headscarf and sunglasses and patted
down her white hair. She spoke only to confirm her name and address and that
she was widowed, but she was otherwise not willing to respond to questions from
the court, according to Wolfgang Molkentin, her lawyer.
She looked
on as the indictment was read out to the packed courtroom, appearing to listen.
Occasionally she rubbed her face, clasped at the electronic tag on her left
wrist and cast her gaze around the room through the glass screen erected to
protect her from coronavirus infection.
The court
heard how Furchner, born Irmgard Dirksen in 1925, worked as the chief secretary
for Hoppe and in her administrative role “was contributory to the entire
killing operation” at the camp.
Transport
lists of detainees destined to be sent to Auschwitz to be murdered as well as
radio messages, the dictation of Hoppe’s orders and his correspondence went
through Furchner’s hands, according to the prosecution.
The court
was told she would have “been aware of all happenings” at Stutthof because of
her key administrative position, as well as the relatively compact layout of
the camp.
A
particularly gruesome practice carried out at Stutthof was the tricking of
prisoners into believing their height was to be measured, when in fact SS men
disguised as doctors would position them in order to shoot them in the neck
from a viewing point in an adjoining room. This method was used to shoot around
30 prisoners within a two-hour timeframe. The bodies were subsequently hosed
down, carted away and burnt.
Detainees
were also forced into chambers filled from the rooftop with the poisonous gas
Zyklon B. The court referenced witness accounts relating how those trapped
inside screamed in agony, clawing at their skin and tearing out their own hair
due to the pain.
The
associated noises and smells pervaded the camp and, not least due to additional
sights she would have witnessed and verbal communications, it would have been
“unavoidable” for Furchner not to know what was occurring, the trial heard.
In a
statement to the court, Molkentin said Furchner distanced herself from attempts
within far-right circles to label her a hero and said that unlike some of her
supporters she was “not a Holocaust denier”. But he said she resented being
treated in the same light as high-ranking officials who were no longer alive to
take the blame for the crimes committed.
“Irmgard
Furchner does not deny the crimes of the Shoah [Holocaust],” Molkentin told the
court as the defendant rubbed her temples and looked towards the ceiling.
“Neither does she deny the terrible acts that took place as has once again been
made clear to us all in the indictment. She simply rejects the charge around
which this trial ultimately revolves, that she was personally guilty of a
crime.”
Christoph
Rückel, a lawyer representing five co-plaintiffs from the US, France and
Austria, who are due to give evidence over the coming months, asked the court
to reconsider its rejection of his request to arrange a visit to the memorial
site at Stutthof for the state prosecutor and lawyers. “This source of
knowledge cannot really be replaced by other means of evidence,” he said.
“A visual
inspection of the [site] by the trial participants would allow them to see that
the defendant would have – both on her daily route to work and from her view
from the building of the commander, where she had her office ... had to observe
the existence of a gas chamber, a crematorium, a gallows and the omnipresent
daily inhumane treatment of the detainees ... both acoustically and visually.”
Speaking
outside the courtroom, he urged the court to recognise the importance of
ensuring the trial was completed. “Those I am representing here are just as old
as Irmgard Furchner,” he said. “They need closure. As one of them, who has
since died, wrote to me: ‘I haven’t come to the finishing line yet.’”
The trial
is being filmed for historical purposes. The judge, Dominik Groß, underlined
the importance of the unusual step to allow the recording, calling it “one of
the worldwide last criminal trials related to crimes of the Nazi era”.
Furchner is
the first woman to go on trial for Nazi-related crimes in decades. Another
trial of a 100-year-old former concentration camp guard is taking place in
Brandenburg.
The
prosecution case against Furchner is being brought as a result of the trial of
John Demjanjuk, a former camp guard at Sobibor concentration camp, who in 2011
was convicted of aiding and abetting the murders of 28,000 people, setting a
new legal precedent.
It is
scheduled to continue over the next few months. Sessions are limited to about
two hours a day, based on medical advice.
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