As she was pushed into the court in a wheelchair, the elderly woman’s face was hidden behind a printed silk scarf. Sunglasses and a medical mask further shielded her from Press photographers who had been briefly permitted to take pictures. Irmgard Furchner was the first woman to stand trial on charges relating to Third Reich atrocities for decades.
The trial began three years ago – bizarrely – in a juvenile court near Hamburg, Germany. She had been only 18 when she began working as secretary to the Kommandant of Stutthof camp. I noticed an electronic tag on her arm.
It had been attached after she fled her nursing home to avoid trial, an act that seemed to prove she understood the seriousness of her predicament. Bear in mind, this woman was accused of complicity in the deaths of 11,400 people at Stutthof, on Poland’s Baltic coast, which became the first Nazi camp outside Germany when it opened two days after the war’s outbreak. Despite her protestations of innocence, Furchner was convicted as an accessory to mass killings and given a two-year suspended sentence.
Now 99, her appeal against her conviction was rejected last week by Germany’s Federal Court. When I first saw her in 2021, she looked sad and pathetic — just like the 100-year-old man I observed two days later in another German court, wearing a striped jumper and complaining of sleeping difficulties as he faced similar accusations. The Lithuanian-born centenarian could not have looked less threatening.
Ye.