Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp, on Tuesday lost her appeal against her conviction for complicity in the murder of over 10,000 people, AFP reported.
Furchner was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 for her involvement in what prosecutors described as the "cruel and malicious murder" of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Her lawyers alleged she was a civilian working at the camp and not aware of what was going on and had argued for their client to be acquitted.
The judge rejected that argument and convicted Furchner, whose defense team then appealed the sentence to the Federal Court of Justice.
The court on Tuesday upheld the original ruling, with presiding judge Gabriele Cirener saying, "The conviction of the defendant... to a two-year suspended sentence is final."
Furchner worked as the secretary for Stutthof camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe from June 1943 to April 1945, handling his correspondence and taking dictation while her husband served as an SS officer at the camp.
In the 2022 verdict, presiding judge Dominik Gross emphasized that "nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her" and that Furchner was fully aware of the "extremely bad conditions for the prisoners."
Furchner attempted to flee as her trial was about to begin in September 2021, escaping from the retirement home where she resided. She managed to elude authorities for several hours before being captured in nearby Hamburg.
As the trial neared its conclusion, Furchner expressed remorse, telling the court she was "sorry about everything that happened."
Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, praised Tuesday’s ruling, stating that Furchner had been a "conscious accomplice" to murder.
"It's not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life. It's about a perpetrator having to answer for her actions," Schuster said, according to AFP.
Furchner’s case is one among several that Germany has opened against suspected Nazi war criminals in recent years.
Germany’s crackdown on Nazi war criminals began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged with assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp and sentenced to five years. He died in 2012.
In 2020, 93-year-old Stutthof camp guard Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945.
In 2021, German prosecutors charged a 100-year-old man who allegedly served as a Nazi concentration camp guard at Sachsenhausen where more than 100,000 people were killed.
Some of those convicted of Nazi-era war crimes never served their sentences as they passed away before being jailed.
In addition, some cases have been dropped because the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial.
In June, a court in Hanau declined to open proceedings against a 99-year-old alleged former guard at the Sachsenhausen Nazi camp, deeming the suspect unfit to stand trial.
