97-year-old former Nazi typist convicted for involvement in 10,505 murders

Berlin:  A 97-year-old former Nazi typist and stenographer, who worked at a concentration camp in Poland, has been convicted for her involvement in the murders of 10,505 people during the Holocaust, media reports said.

Irmgard Furchner, the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades, was sentenced on Tuesday by a court in Itzehoe, Germany, to a two-year suspended jail term, reports the BBC.

Furchner, as a teenager, had worked at the Stutthof camp near Gdansk in Nazi-occupied Poland, from 1943 until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.

As she was an adolescent at the time of the crimes, Furchner’s trial took place before a juvenile court and her sentence will see her placed into juvenile probation, the court confirmed to CNN.

Some 65,000 people are thought to have died in horrendous conditions at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish Poles and captured Soviet soldiers.

Furchner was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people and complicity in the attempted murder of five others, the BBC reported.

At Stutthof, a variety of methods was used to murder detainees and thousands died in gas chambers there from June 1944.

The court heard from survivors of the camp, some of whom have died during the trial.

When the trial began in September 2021, Furchner went on the run from her retirement home and was eventually found by police on a street in Hamburg.

In her address to the court, Furchner said: “I’m sorry about everything that happened. I regret that I was in Stutthof at the time… That’s all I can say.”

Her trial could be the last to take place in Germany into Nazi-era crimes, although a few cases are still being investigated,the BBC reported.

Two other cases have gone to court in recent years for Nazi crimes committed at Stutthof.