{"id":6530,"date":"2023-03-13T09:27:57","date_gmt":"2023-03-13T19:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/?p=6530"},"modified":"2023-03-13T09:27:58","modified_gmt":"2023-03-13T19:27:58","slug":"a-lesson-for-war-crimes-committed-in-hawaii-last-year-a-german-court-has-convicted-a-97-year-old-ex-secretary-at-nazi-camp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/a-lesson-for-war-crimes-committed-in-hawaii-last-year-a-german-court-has-convicted-a-97-year-old-ex-secretary-at-nazi-camp\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lesson for War Crimes Committed in Hawai\u2018i: Last Year a German Court has Convicted a 97-year-old Ex-Secretary at Nazi Camp"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

December 20, 2022
Associated Press<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Irmgard Furchner sits in the courtroom at the beginning of the trial day in Itzehoe, Germany, Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2021. Christian Charisius\/AP<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

BERLIN (AP) \u2014 A German court on Tuesday convicted a 97-year-old woman of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders for her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis\u2019 Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Irmgard Furchner was accused of being part of the apparatus that helped the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, function. The Itzehoe state court in northern Germany 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The court said judges were convinced that Furchner \u201cknew and, through her work as a stenographer in the commandant\u2019s 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,\u201d by transportation to the Auschwitz death camp and by being sent on death marches at the end of the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe promotion of these acts by the accused took place through the completion of paperwork\u201d in the camp commander\u2019s office, a court statement said. \u201cThis activity was necessary for the organization of the camp and the execution of the cruel, systematic acts of killing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The verdict and sentence were in line with\u00a0prosecutors\u2019 demands<\/strong><\/a>. Defense lawyers had asked for their client\u00a0to be acquitted<\/a><\/strong>, arguing that the evidence hadn\u2019t shown beyond doubt that Furchner knew about the systematic killings at the camp, meaning there was no proof of intent as required for criminal liability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her closing statement, Furchner said she was sorry for what had happened and regretted that she had been at Stutthof at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furchner appeared to follow the verdict attentively but didn\u2019t show any obvious emotion. It wasn\u2019t immediately clear whether she would appeal, though lawyer Wolf Molkentin said the defense team thinks the case presents \u201cinsurmountable doubts\u201d as to her guilt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But presiding Judge Dominik Gross said it was \u201csimply beyond all imagination\u201d that Furchner didn\u2019t notice the killings at Stutthof, German news agency dpa reported. He said she could see from her office the collection point where new prisoners had to wait after arrival, and the crematorium was in constant use in the fall of 1944, with smoke spreading across the camp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furchner was tried in juvenile court because she was 18 and 19 at the time of the alleged crimes and the court couldn\u2019t establish beyond a doubt her \u201cmaturity of mind\u201d at the time of the alleged offenses. Gross nonetheless noted Tuesday that she could have resigned from her position at any time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furchner failed to appear for\u00a0the start of her trial<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0in September 2021, but police later picked her up and she was placed in detention for several days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that \u201ctoday\u2019s verdict is the best that could be achieved, given the fact that she was tried in a juvenile court.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn view of Furchner\u2019s recent statement to the court that she \u2018regretted everything,\u2019 we were concerned that the court might accept her defense attorney\u2019s plea for an acquittal,\u201d Zuroff said in a statement. \u201cYet given her claim that she had no knowledge of the murders being committed in the camp, her regret was far from convincing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres\u2019 spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said of the verdict that \u201cit shows that it\u2019s never too late to ensure that there was some accountability for crimes committed of such horrific nature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prosecutors in Itzehoe said during the proceedings that Furchner\u2019s trial may be the last of its kind. However, a special federal prosecutors\u2019 office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes says prosecutors in various parts of Germany have five more cases pending, dpa reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charges of murder and accessory to murder aren\u2019t subject to a statute of limitations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, Stutthof was later used as a so-called \u201cwork education camp\u201d where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp, along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses. More than 60,000 people were killed at the camp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

December 20, 2022Associated Press BERLIN (AP) \u2014 A German court on Tuesday convicted a 97-year-old woman of being an accessory to more than 10,000 murders for her role as a secretary to the SS commander of the Nazis\u2019 Stutthof concentration … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-war-crimes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p31YBQ-1Hk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6530"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7232,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6530\/revisions\/7232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hawaiiankingdom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}