Former Nazi concentration camp secretary is silent at trial opening

The 96-year-old former secretary of a Nazi concentration camp remained silent on the first day of her trial in Germany, which finally began this Tuesday after being postponed three weeks ago due to an escape attempt.

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Irmgard Furchner faces before the court of Itzehoe (north) the charges of complicity in murders and attempted murders in more than 11,000 cases in the Stutthof concentration camp, in present-day Poland, between 1943 and 1945.

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This Tuesday, the nonagenarian entered the courtroom in a wheelchair, dressed in a white jacket and carrying a cane in one hand, an AFP journalist confirmed.

To hide his face from the many prominent photographers and videographers at the scene, his head was covered with a scarf and he wore large sunglasses.

“He will not make any statement at this time. Nor will he answer questions, “said his lawyer Wolf Molkentin.

Furchner, the only woman implicated in Nazism to be tried for decades in Germany, gave her identity and then remained silent, listening to the indictment.

Her trial had started on September 30 in a bizarre way: the defendant, who lives in a nursing home near Hamburg, had fled instead of appearing in court.

He is now appearing free, but precautionary surveillance measures have been taken to ensure his presence at the hearings.

The prosecution accuses her of having “aided and incited the perfidious and cruel murder” of thousands of prisoners, between June 1943 and April 1945, in this camp where she worked as a typist and secretary to the commander of the place, Paul Werner Hoppe.

– He pretends “not to know anything” –

In this camp near the city of Gdansk (Danzig at that time) where 65,000 people died, “Jewish detainees, Polish partisans and Soviet prisoners of war” were systematically murdered, the Prosecutor’s Office stressed.

According to his powers, “he ensured the proper functioning of the field” and “had knowledge of all the events that occurred in Stutthof,” especially the shooting or gassing murders, according to prosecutor Maxi Wantzen.

In a recent interview, given in 2019 to the NDR newspaper, the former secretary had indicated that she “did not know anything” about the massacres committed in that field.

In a letter sent before the date of the first hearing, the accused indicated to the investigating judge that she did not wish to appear in person in court.

That day of her first appearance, she took a taxi and disappeared for a few hours, before being found. Placed in preventive detention, she was released a week later.

– Belated justice –

His behavior caused great consternation. His absence showed “contempt for the survivors and for the law,” the vice president of the Auschwitz International Committee, Christoph Heubner, told AFP.

“If you are healthy to escape, you are healthy to go to prison,” tweeted Efraim Zuroff, an Israeli-American Nazi hunter, president of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has helped bring war criminals to trial.

Seventy-six years after the end of the Second World War, the German courts are still looking for former Nazi criminals still alive, although it is a justice considered too late by the victims.

Germany also extended its investigations to the executors, often subordinates who received orders, of the Nazi machine.

Another defendant, Josef Schütz, centenary, began his appearance on October 7 in the court of Brandenburg-an-Havel (northeast), before which he claims to be innocent.

He is the oldest currently accused of Nazi crimes. This former noncommissioned officer of the SS “Totenkopf” division is accused of “complicity in the murders” of 3,518 prisoners, when he was stationed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1942 and 1945.

“The individuals suspected of Nazi crimes who are currently living were very young at the time of the events and held rather subordinate positions,” Guillaume Mouralis, director of research at the CNRS (French national center for scientific research), told AFP. and member of the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin.

“The paradox is that the ‘office criminals’ in the middle and upper echelons of the hierarchy were ultimately very little concerned (by justice),” he added.

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Deshawn