BERLIN (AP) — A German federal court will announce its verdict Tuesday on the appeal of a 99-year-old woman who was convicted of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders for her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp during World War II. Irmgard Furchner took her case to the Federal Court of Justice after her conviction in December 2022 by a state court in Itzehoe in northern Germany. She was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, function.
The state court gave her a two-year suspended sentence for being an accessory to murder in 10,505 cases and an accessory to attempted murder in five cases. At a federal court hearing in Leipzig last month, Furchner's lawyers cast doubt on whether she really was an accessory to crimes committed by the commander and other senior camp officials, and on whether she had truly been aware of what was going on at Stutthof. The Itzehoe court said that judges were convinced 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 by gassings, by hostile conditions in the camp,” by transportation to the Auschwitz death camp and by being sent on death marches at the end of the war.
Prosecutors said during the original proceedings that Furchner’s trial may.